


The Shape of the Universe

by Scatterboom



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-10-14 01:52:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 76,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10526406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scatterboom/pseuds/Scatterboom
Summary: Einstein’s theory of relativity states that it is impossible to say whether two things occur simultaneously if they are separated in space.The detective is home again in London with a phantom Moriarty to hunt down – leaving a certain suicide mission in Eastern Europe unattended. Who better to take over than someone who’s already dead?Separated by miles – and years – Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes attempt to condense their shared universe into something a little more observable.Set within the time jumps inThe Six Thatchers.





	1. Contact

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! Glad to be back in the multi-chapter game. I've been excited to post this for a really long time.
> 
> I've been working on this fic since last year, and at first I was determined to have it out before S4 aired, but as its premiere date drew closer I lost a lot of motivation. But then _The Six Thatchers_ aired and had this FANTASTIC time jump in the beginning of the episode (plus another in the middle), giving my original idea plenty of space to play. I was invigorated enough to revisit my first few chapters and rewrite _a lot_ \- I had to scrap my original explanation for the Moriarty broadcasts, push around my timeline to fit around T6T, and sadly, reduce John's role somewhat - he originally spends the entirety of this story aware of Irene, but then TLD gave me _that_ scene to work with, lol. No matter - still plenty of love for him and other characters in this fic!
> 
> **ETA, DECEMBER 12TH, 2017:** A big, fat, overjoyed thank you to SceneryFr and ChristinaCC for working on a Chinese translation of The Shape Of The Universe! You can find all finished chapters [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12875334/chapters/29410731) Thank you, friends, for your hard work!
> 
> The next several chapters are finished and ready to upload, so expect regular updates (maybe once a week) for some time. My progress has slowed down considerably, which is partly why I've decided to begin posting this: so that I'm motivated into a story-completing panic. I'm only half-kidding. I've missed the Adlock community sorely - please enjoy! :)

_“Did you miss me?”_

Sherlock Holmes’ eyes are closed. Generally speaking, it’s not a state he favours, especially when he has a case to solve and clues to find.

And especially not when he has a rather alarming video playing on a screen in front of him, looping over and over, a puzzle with jigsaw pieces that are scattered and overturned. There’s quite a lot to look at.

Still, he chooses to have his eyes closed.

_“Did you miss me?”_

He’s leaned forward in his chair, his hands locked together under his chin. He listens.

_“Did you miss me?”_

He listens, but he doesn’t deduce.

Not any longer, at least. In the 623 times he’s heard the recording play over, he’s taken apart the tinny layers of sound bit by bit, dissecting every syllable, until he knows the pitch and key of each millisecond and the exact amount of dust that’s collected to clog the speakers of Mycroft’s laptop. He now knows the data, for lack of a better phrase, by heart.

_“Did you miss me?”_

And that’s the problem. Rather than a clue, the recording’s engraved itself into his mind, free of its physical confines, as what it really is: a question. And that’s all he can hear.

_“Did you miss me?”_

Good question.

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t _miss._ It’s a waste of time to fantasize about what he could be doing with who or what isn’t there. It would be much more productive to work with what he _does_ have in front of him. Missing, Sherlock thinks, is an activity for people who feel powerless.

…He will admit, at certain times, to giving in to that embarrassing kind of self-pity. In the two years he was abroad, destroying (what he thought was) the tattered remains of Moriarty’s web, it was hard not to think often of 221B, of the Yard, of London itself. It was harder of course not to think of people, like Mrs. Hudson, or Molly or Lestrade, and who else but John Watson, his best friend and one confidante in the lonely world.

But his advantage then was that he _knew_ that what he was currently doing – eliminating henchmen, destroying ties between shadowy organizations – was actively leading him back to them. That every step, however tedious, made his friends safer and safer.

That’s not powerlessness, Sherlock thinks. It’s patience.

_“Do you miss me?”_ asks an entirely different voice.

His eyes fly open.

Mycroft’s satellite office in MI6 is just as empty and dim as before. His laptop is Sherlock’s only companion still – its screen had long since darkened, but its speakers continue to sneer in Moriarty’s silky drawl, _“Did you miss me?”_

Sherlock takes in a breath. His hands, still locked under his chin, stiffen the tiniest bit.

He knows for a fact that, in the darker depths of his mind palace, it’s Moriarty’s voice that sounds out all the doubts he thought he’d hidden away. It was one of the reasons why, upon first hearing this clip Mycroft had sent him on the plane, his subsequent overdose was the most intense he’d ever experienced. But _that_ one repetition... it was so vivid and deep, and not at all murky as if emitted by a machine, that he knows it was from his own mind, taunting him. This one…

No. He won’t give it power by giving it a name. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t _miss_. No place. No person.

No Woman…

“Would you get out of my chair,” Mycroft says.

Sherlock looks up to see his brother standing at the door, and behind him, Mary Watson. It’s only been around three hours since he’s last seen them, but with how weary they look, it’s as if they’ve lived out an eon of history while he was gone.

He squints. Mycroft wears his usual sour face, though the harsh light above hits his sharp nose, casting a black shadow over his mouth. In his immaculate suit, his hands in his pockets, he is as unreadable as ever.

But then he looks behind him – Mary, though her skin glows from her pregnancy (bump visible under her red coat), somehow looks pale. Her lips are a tight line, and she stares directly at him, not blinking.

“Well, don’t talk like I’ve been sitting here to spite you,” Sherlock finally replies, getting up. “I’ve just been catching up on what everyone seems to have lost their minds over.”

“It took you three hours to do that?” asks Mycroft. He strides across the office and round his desk to take his rightful place. Sherlock begrudgingly steps aside for him.

Mycroft taps a key on his laptop; the Moriarty recording finally quits looping and the room plunges into a numbing silence.

“Oh thank god,” Mary sighs, some tension leaving her shoulders. “I could hear it from the hallway. Thought I’d break down the door to smash that thing to pieces myself.”

“I don’t have much else to do, to tell you the truth,” Sherlock says flatly, slumping into one of the seats in front of Mycroft’s desk. “Where’s John?”

Mary’s face softens in that way he likes. “Taking a nap in the other office. He’s very tired. It’s… better he’s not here to hear this.”

Sherlock furrows his brows at that, but turns back to his brother. “What have _you_ been doing, then?”

Mycroft stares at him, for an oddly long, quiet moment. He tents his fingers under his chin.

“Speaking with the agent recommended by the Secret Service to replace you.”

Right, that thing. It had been for some boring undercover job, all to do with cleaning up a mess left by MI6 after an ill-advised alliance with Libyan officials. Potentially deadly, yes, but not very stimulating to the mind. He’s almost thankful the Moriarty video came up to take him away from it.

Sherlock has to roll his eyes. “I’m sure they were ecstatic to be tapped for a job everyone is so casually calling a ‘suicide mission’.

His brother looks at him again. It’s a calm, yet infuriatingly unreadable expression. It’s a look Sherlock will never forget, mainly for the words that come after it.

“Actually, she stepped forward herself.”

Something in Sherlock suddenly goes cold.

Mycroft remains still, very carefully watching his face.

But there is nothing external about Sherlock’s current reaction – his mind has kicked into overdrive, taking Mycroft’s response and assessing it word by word. “Stepped forward”, this is someone who _wanted_ the job. Why? For excitement, for a death wish? Use of the pronoun _she_ – rather than sticking with “they” to keep the agent anonymous, to afford Sherlock some detachment, it’s important he knows that it’s a woman –

_No…_

Despite his skin, and the blood underneath it, suddenly feeling very chilled, his heart’s started to thud at a painful pace. _Eliminate the impossible_ , he reminds himself, and he luckily still has something of a composed appearance when he trains his eyes sharply on Mary, seated in the chair next to him. “You…?”

She shakes her head. “God, no. I wish. Sounded like fun. But I’ve got this one to look after.” She pats a gentle hand on her swollen belly.

When she flicks her eyes back up to Sherlock again, though, she seems to notice his subtle panic, his hands slightly gripping the arms of his chair. The humor leaves her face and voice. “Sherlock. It’s exactly what you think.”

And just like that, after just a few stubborn attempts in as many minutes to push away the memory of her, Irene Adler’s face, stark and smiling and wicked, lips red and eyes dark, materializes in his mind, and Sherlock Holmes feels as if he’s been knocked to the floor despite not having moved from his chair at all.

_Do you miss me?_

He whips back to look at Mycroft again. “She’s in witness protection in America.”

Mycroft puts up a hand. “No need to play dumb. Once my connection in MI6 received her call and transferred her to me, she explained everything.”

“How much of everything?” he has to ask.

Mycroft, to his credit, doesn’t seem utterly furious. “Enough of it to know your involvement.”

Sherlock feels as if the room could be tilting.

No, he doesn’t feel any guilt over what he did in Karachi. Not even over concealing the truth from his brother, his friends. But, it turns out, once you’re found out, it’s an entirely different dynamic…

_Do you miss me?_

If Irene Adler really had explained everything to Mycroft, then he will have learned just how far Sherlock had gone to save her. How he’d used those skills in his repertoire he always refused to loan to MI6 in service to his nation: infiltrating terrorist bases, altering confidential footage. Killing in cold blood.

It’s akin to laying his body on an autopsy table, while Irene Adler slices his chest open to demonstrate to his brother just the way his heart beats.

“John,” Sherlock says. He’s not there, obviously. But calling his friend’s name seems to be his natural reflex whenever he feels like he’s out of his element. Mycroft sighs, because obviously he finds it ridiculous – but Mary. Mary understands. She knows it could simply mean _where is he_ or _I need his help._

The blonde woman smiles sadly. “Like I said. Better he wasn’t here to hear all this.”

Sherlock realizes he’s been clenching his fist. Slowly he uncurls it. “He deserves to know.”

“No,” Mycroft says. “This information doesn’t leave this room… Mrs. Watson is privy to this only because she had the prudence to eavesdrop on my phone call.”

Upon saying this his eyes slide over to the woman, who looks back defiantly, back held straight. “I wanted to make bloody sure you were taking Sherlock off this assignment,” she says. “I can’t let him go through hell. Not again.”

Sherlock, despite his daze, hears all this. He also sees how his brother does not break his intense stare with Mary, but it’s not a look of contempt. He seems to regard her with a distant, though real, respect.

Everyone in this room seems to be performing some sort of penance, he thinks. All three unable to cast the first stone. All three on the side of the angels, but not angels themselves. An equilibrium of guilt.

All the more reason John shouldn’t be here. It’s unfair, Sherlock realizes, to put this burden on him. He will forgive him for keeping this a secret. Eventually. He thinks.

He lets the thought calm him down, until he’s sure he can fashion his expression into one of cold indifference.

He reaches to refasten the button on his suit jacket as he stands from his chair, as casually as he can. “In any case. Do let her know I turn down her _flattering_ offer to take my place, as much as I’d like t – “

“Sherlock,” Mycroft interrupts, his voice suddenly much sharper.

Sherlock pauses mid-rise, raising an eyebrow.

Mycroft clasps his hands together, in front of his mouth. “We already gave her the job. She’s on her way to Turkey, now.”

Some overwhelming weight sinks Sherlock back into his chair.

Mycroft and Mary are staring at him now, but all he can see is a blur of their faces, and all he can hear is a long, loud, constant ring. The sound grows, and grows, until he wonders if his skin might shatter like glass.

His previous reaction, just minutes ago, was one of shock. But shock dies as news grows old.

This is not shock – with every second it intensifies, consuming every ounce of blood in his veins. This is anger.

“You’re telling me,” he says, voice low, “You’re making her go on a mission that you yourself predicted would result in death within six months.”

“I predicted that for _you_ ,” Mycroft replies, unwavering. “And I’m not _making_ her go. In fact, we mutually struck a deal – should she accomplish the objectives, I provide her with safe re-entry into Britain.”

That only makes Sherlock scoff, “Oh isn’t that so convenient. She succeeds and the MI6 stops breathing down your neck, and it takes you just a wave of your hand to achieve your end of the deal. If she doesn’t, you’ll at least have a petty criminal off your hands.”

“Wouldn’t it be _so_ easy for you to frame me as the puppet master,” Mycroft finally snaps. “May I remind you that not three hours earlier I was pacing the floor pondering the Moriarty video, just as you were? I wasn’t even thinking about MI6 before _her_ call was passed to _me._ You can fantasize all you want that this is some grand orchestration of mine all meant to spite you, but there’s no denying her very eager involvement. Why don’t you ask yourself whom you’re _actually_ angry with, brother?”

A snarl has formed on Sherlock’s lips. He grips the arms of his chair again, until he almost feels his nails sink into the ornate wood. From the corner of his eye he can detect Mary, leaned slightly forward in her chair, possibly preparing to hold him back should he lunge at his brother for being so _fucking_ insufferable.

He asks, slowly, “Where is she now.”

Mycroft seems to quiet down as well. “As I said. On a plane to mission base in Turkey. I’m afraid I can’t disclose to you where exactly she was picked up.”

Sherlock’s jaw works. “Call her again.”

Mary finally cuts in. “I don’t think you’re in any state to confront –“

“I need to speak to her. Call her.”

His brother simply raises an eyebrow. “You need _me_ to do that for you?”

Sherlock wavers. “I don’t have her contact details.”

“Really? After such a valiant rescue in Karachi?”

Mycroft’s tone, and choice of words, are meant specifically to irritate. In truth, it could be enough for Sherlock to pick up his chair and throw it at him. But he can only swallow. “I haven’t spoken to her since then.”

There is an odd silence that falls on the room. Sherlock knows now for sure that Mary is still looking at him, something like concern – maybe even pity – in her expression.

But if he has to admit that to get what he wants, he’ll do it.

It wouldn’t be his lowest point that day.

Mycroft, for his part, remains unmoving. But then, he slowly stands as he reaches into his suit jacket, into the inner pocket, and pulls out his mobile. “Come with me.”


	2. An Unstoppable Force

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the absolutely heartening response to Chapter 1! I've missed a lot of you.
> 
> Here be much-needed exposition from Irene's POV, so this update comes early. :) Enjoy!

Irene Adler is alive and well.

Through the window of her jet she can only see miles of deep blue sky. There is no sound but the low, soothing rumble of the engine, echoing through the cabin. The only people onboard with her are the two pilots, deposited in the cockpit where she can’t see them, and some representative from MI6, sent to mind her as she’s brought to her mission base in Istanbul, though he’s fast asleep in a seat far in front. For all intents and purposes, she is quite effectively alone.

It’s a wonderful feeling, for now.

She wraps her fingers gently around her glass of sparkling water – a drink served to her, after she’d asked for it! Not pushed into her hands by an overly eager American CFO, not stolen off the silver tray of a distracted marquesa, whose party she’s infiltrated. (The past few years in hiding hadn’t been _all_ rough). For a brief, lovely moment, she remembers what it was like to have the British monarchy in the palm of her hand, and being served things far grander than a fancy drink.

She taps against that glass, and watches the energy travel in tiny ripples across the water’s surface. _It won’t ever be like that again,_ she must remind herself. Even if she succeeds and is allowed safe entry back into Britain, it’s not as if she can return to her old profession, her old antics, her old life, like nothing had ever happened. She would have to change her name and live low, and be essentially the farthest thing from Irene Adler that one could be.

And yet here she is, risking her life to achieve that.

It’s a daunting few months ahead, but she can’t help but grin. Even lions viciously exiled from their prides try to return and regain their favor, don’t they?

Which reminds her of that certain lion in the British Government who’d banished _her_ from home. _All roar, no bite,_ she thinks, holding her sharp smile.

* * *

_Hours earlier_

 “You’re supposed to be dead,” comes Mycroft Holmes' barely missed voice.

“I was never one to follow the script.”

“I’ve come up with thirteen different explanations as to how you could possibly be speaking to me now, alive, and eleven of them infuriate me.”

“Let me offer just one: You were wrong. Straight to the point, don’t you think?”

A beat of silence on the other end. “My brother had something to do with it.”

“A statement? Or a request for confirmation?”

“A counterargument. I wasn’t wrong, as you say I was. First explanation I’d thought of: Sherlock Holmes. He can’t mind his own bloody business.”

“Oh, I know. I learned that just as painfully as you did.”

Silence, again. Then, “Tell me how you survived. And _why.”_

* * *

_Present_

It hadn’t been too difficult reaching Mycroft Holmes’ personal line – it wasn’t as if she’d immediately forgotten everything saved to her precious cameraphone when it was taken from her. Names of a few Secret Service officials whose proclivities she knew well, the mobile numbers to reach them: it took only a few precisely chosen words to get them to bend to her will, and transfer her call to the desk of the Ice Man himself.

It’s a satisfying thought about such an ill-fated night, she thinks as she leans back into her seat, sipping from her glass. They can take away her material leverages, but her mind, and memory, are untouchable. It’s knowledge she uses rarely, knowing the risk in exposing her location and identity… but she found that this was a very special occasion.

And oh, how special it was, for everyone involved.

* * *

_Hours earlier_

“I’ll run you through the mission brief now, but MI6 will be sending an agent over to hand you the physical files,” Mycroft tells her. “But before that...”

“Hmm?”

“How did you know this mission existed,” he asks, sounding displeased to be the one in the dark for once, in this conversation. “…And how did you know Sherlock Holmes was taking it?”

“Well,” Irene says, “To start off, I’ve always kept tabs on MI6’s activities – bloody good entertainment, I confess. Hollywood can’t compete.”

“Answer the question.”

“To tell you the truth,” Irene continues, “I hadn’t been paying attention lately. Foreign intelligence had been boring – but you knew that, of course. It just so happened that I was reading the paper one morning when I came upon an interesting little article about how someone had shot this Magnussen character in front of dozens of witnesses. I knew then that there was only one suspect – our dear Sherlock.”

“’Our’?”

“And yet, in the following days… nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Echo, echo.”

“Do continue,” says Mycroft without a trace of mirth.

“That’s it, Mr. Holmes,” Irene replies. “Nothing. I didn’t hear of any trial, or verdict, or new findings from the investigation; in fact, there wasn’t a single piece of news on the culprit for the next few days. Absolute silence. Puzzling, seeing as both killer and victim were very famous people. You would think the press would snap up any morsel of information. I knew then that the Government had done a little… meddling. Which drove me to look into the matter.”

“I wasn’t ‘meddling’.”

“Oh, hm, shall I use a softer word? Negotiating? Navigating? The fact of the matter is, Mr. Holmes, you evaded legal procedure to buy your spoiled brat of a brother more time. It’s very stereotypically posh of you.”

“If you've such a low opinion of both of us,” snarls Mycroft, “Why are you reaching out? For your own smug enjoyment?”

Ah, she’d prepared for this question. “I have an offer for you.”

* * *

The mission itself is, surprisingly, quite an intriguing case, and not the tedious spot of damage control Irene had expected. Mycroft had laid it out for her very plainly, while she listened on a burner phone in a dark, secluded diner on the outskirts of the Portuguese town she’d last lingered in.

“I assume you knew of MI6’s collaboration with Libya in the civil war with the Islamic State,” Mycroft says to her as if he were merely reading out a shopping list. “Early last year they’d been supplying weapons and sending our own people to train the Syrian army. Mostly they were seasoned colonels, lieutenant generals, in their last few years of service. Unfortunately, a few turned… disloyal.”

“See the Islamic State once a week in seedy motels, did they?” asks Irene, twirling a sugar stick between her fingers.

Mycroft, predictably, does not dignify the joke with a response. “Three former lieutenant generals – Peter Browning, Margaret Shield, and Terrence Waters – disappeared some months into the training process, along with a number of Syrian soldiers who’d been under their instruction. Their trails were untraceable and they were never heard from again. Their superiors feared a kidnapping, though no ransom message ever came.

“Recently, MI6 has detected a number of attempts to hack into the government’s virtual information systems. They’ve all, thankfully, been unsuccessful. The officers noticed that the codes and methods employed by these aspiring cyber-terrorists seemed half-formed, incomplete. Like they’d simply ripped a single page from a manual.”

Irene, stirring a teaspoon into her dreadful coffee, raises an eyebrow. “You think these three former lieutenant generals are trying to hack into the British Government’s databases?”

“Oh no, Miss Adler. Their clients are.”

The teaspoon is abandoned. “Clients.”

“The tech team traced all of these attempts to have come from Istanbul and some of its surrounding cities. More importantly, they seem to be coming from the offices of certain members of the Eastern European elite. We have reason to believe that Browning, Shield, and Waters have fled there and begun peddling fragments of British intelligence to whoever can afford to buy. Not enough to bring all of Parliament down in one fell swoop, mind. Just enough so that the buyer can use such information in their own… international negotiations.”

“I do believe I see my part in this now.”

“How very reassuring. The lieutenant generals are making sure to keep low profiles; they’ve put up strict security. The last agent that MI6 had sent in to investigate – not even to intercept – was shot dead by what appears to be one of the Syrian trainees. We have, however, narrowed down a list of European aristocrats we suspect are doing business with them. You will pose as a Swedish noble who approaches them, aspiring to do the same.”

“Swedish?”

“We presume the Renegade Three wouldn’t react too pleasantly to a high-position Briton knowing of their lucrative little business.”

Irene hums. “You presume sensibly.”

“Along with that cover, you’ll have some assistance from MI6’s foreign allies. The objective is to bring all three back to Britain alive, for proper interrogation and sentencing. So,” Mycroft says, cleanly. “Do you accept?”

Irene indulges in being silent for several seconds, in the suspense she keeps him in, even when she’d made her mind up long, long before.

* * *

_Present_

“Er, Miss Adler?”

Irene turns from the window to see her MI6 escort standing before her seat, looking a little confused and more than a little unhappy to be awake. He holds a mobile in his hand. “Uh… Mr. Holmes would like to speak with you.”

 _What does Mycroft want to nag to me about this time,_ she thinks with a pang of irritation, taking the phone. She lifts it to her ear. “To what do I owe the pleas-“

“What the _hell_ ,” rumbles a voice that is very angry, very familiar, and decidedly not Mycroft. “do you think you’re doing?”

A full and radiant smile spreads across Irene’s lips. She smooths her free hand over the armrest of her seat and takes a steady grip at the end of it, relishing, not recoiling from, how quick her heartbeat’s become.

“Wonderful to hear from you, too,” she replies, sweetly.

“Is this some kind of taunt,” he asks, “are you enjoying the fact that you can dangle this over my head? I can’t imagine you’re doing this out of some fervent, newfound patriotism.” His tone is sharp, his breathing unsteady, and Irene can tell he’s heavily pacing the room as he speaks to her.

“I’m offended you think I’d have such cruel intentions.”

“Don’t _play_ me,” he snaps, so severe and acidic her pulse makes a delightful jump. “And don’t presume you’re helping me. For your bloody information, you’re not doing me any favors by taking over this assignment.”

“Agreed,” Irene says. “If anything, you’re doing _me_ a favor. I finish the job you left undone, I get to go home and thank you in person. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

He says, icily, “It’s clear from the radio silence for the past four years, and the fact you didn’t even think to contact me before calling MI6, that how _I_ feel is the least of your worries.”

“And what would that have achieved,” she retaliates, allowing some of her irritation to seep through, “besides potentially alert my old enemies that I was alive and communicating with someone in London? You were always the one scolding me over risking my safety for the sake of a cheap thrill.”

“Evidently I didn’t do it enough,” Sherlock bites back, “because you’re at it again.”

 “To gain back something lost.”

“To gamble something you don’t have.”

“What would you rather I’d have done?” Irene is genuinely curious. “Stay put? Cut off all my ties in London?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says adamantly. And then, he mutters, as if unwilling to admit, “Besides, you seem to have cut off your ties with apparent ease.”

Irene tuts in theatrical sadness. “Did you miss me?”

A sudden, sharp silence on the other end. She hears a rush of breath, like she’d stopped the words already in Sherlock’s throat from escaping. It takes her a moment, but she realizes what’s stunned him.

“…I must admit your own case sounds far more compelling than mine,” she says. “His face. His voice. Broadcasted all across England. I’d rather follow a trail of bread crumbs that led to _him_ instead of these dull military men. Seems far more exciting.”

Sherlock takes an almost imperceptibly shaky breath. “How pleased do you think I am to have to investigate this?”

Irene smiles. “As pleased as I am about putting my life on the line to earn back a passport?” She adds, somberly, “Don’t you worry. I know of the odds. Mycroft told me.”

“Six months,” Sherlock says.

“He gave me four.”

Silence, again. The continuous crackle of static in these wordless spaces is almost as loud as the rumble of the plane Irene sits inside.

Then, Sherlock speaks again, in a voice that is like a heavy, overwhelming blend of both cold distrust and real unease. “Why are you doing this.”

Irene leans back against her headrest. “I would’ve told you before that London could use a little trouble again. But it seems dear Jim beat me to the punch.”

A harsh grunt of frustration. “How could I ever believe a single word you say?”

“You could start by listening to me.”

“And how do you propose I do that?” he snarls.

An idea blooms into existence in her mind. She curls a hand again around her glass of water, and watches the ripples. “I propose,” she says, “That we call each other.”

Sherlock’s lack of response signals, of course, his utter bafflement. She clarifies, “Some days I’ll call you, some you’ll call me. We’ll update each other on what progress we’ve made so that neither of us can complain that we’re missing out on anything. Like we’re each other’s diaries. I hear it works wonders for long-distance.”

“Don’t mock me.”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“ _Call_ you?” he scoffs. “While you’re undercover, trying not to be found out by your marks, whose trade is communications infiltration?”

“You underestimate your older brother, Mr. Holmes,” she says, smiling, knowing how much such a statement would annoy the man. “He’s generously given me a new mobile. Communicates only with other devices of MI6, as the signal’s undetectable and untraceable by anything else. It’s how I’m to report back to the British Government. You can get him to give you your own so that we can keep in touch. If he loves you enough to spare you from a prison sentence, he’ll love you enough to do that.”

For a moment Irene hears nothing from the other end. She wonders briefly if Sherlock is taking this call alone, or if his brother is indeed witnessing the conversation from a corner of the room.

“Just what do you expect to accomplish with this?” he says finally, his voice low and hard.

Irene doesn’t answer immediately. For a heartbeat, the clouds outside her window slide past to give way to a blinding flash of sunlight, only for it to disappear again behind a new blanket of white.

She replies, each word honest, “Everything I can, Mr. Holmes.”

Silence again. She’s beginning to become well-acquainted with the hum of feedback noise.

“Don’t be scared for me,” Irene soothes him, after a moment, “I’m going to have fun. And so are you. I’ll want to know everything you uncover about those Moriarty videos.”

“Are _you_ scared?” he asks; she chooses not to decipher if such a question means he’s denying – or admitting – that he is, himself.

Her fingers on the armrest curl slightly, as if holding an imaginary hand beneath them. As if taking a pulse. “Only if you think I should be.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while, so that the only sounds she hears are their equally slowed breaths.

“Be scared,” Sherlock tells her. He hangs up after that.

Irene Adler is still for a moment. But then, after a steady inhale, she puts down the phone, and looks out the window of her plane headed for Istanbul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MI6 did, in fact, supply weapons and training to the Syrian Army in early 2016. The whole lieutenant generals deserting thing, and attempts at hacking, however, are my own invention and blind, bewildered groping in the shady world of foreign intelligence operations.
> 
> Also fictional are the ~cool phones I'm giving both Irene and Sherlock. They'll serve a greater purpose in the story than just being a fancy way for them to go "no _you_ hang up first" at each other like teenagers, I promise.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	3. Connectivity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all again for the kudos and wonderful conversations we've been having! I absolutely _love_ hearing everyone's different takes on Sherlock and Irene's relationship.
> 
> I'll be going on a trip from now til Sunday, so please forgive me if I don't respond to your comments until then. Wishing everyone a relaxing week. Enjoy!

Sherlock waits two weeks before calling her.

They’re an astonishingly ordinary fifteen days, save for the tearful, joyous embraces of friends like Mrs. Hudson, Molly, Lestrade (he’ll deny the “tearful”, but Sherlock knows what he saw), who had thought that he truly was gone for good. The Watsons visit 221 incessantly to make sure he’s eating, sleeping, and not setting fire to anything outside of the kitchen.

John, in particular, is overly concerned. He’ll spend a third of the visit with his nose to his phone, scrolling through his inbox for a case to offer him, another dryly cracking jokes to lift what he thinks is just one of Sherlock’s extended sour moods, the last third insistently asking him how he feels about Moriarty being back (he’s not). Sherlock can only turn his head to the window and resist admitting to his friend what’s really on his mind. John will forgive him one day, he reminds himself. Hopefully.

Mary will merely flash him a gentle, though worried smile, and change the topic.

Still, Baker Street is… a comforting place to be. He thinks of the time he’d thought he was seeing it for the last time in his life, a cold, gray morning. Not even fading winter light could ever dull the warm, dusty tones of his sitting room: the carpet, the wallpaper, the mantel. Here, at least, his mind reaches something close to quiet.

He passes the time by taking cases on Twitter, which, while a reliable source for a constant stream of new distractions, are only just that: distractions. None of the mundane mysteries online strangers present him with seem to contain any connection with the Moriarty videos, as he had hoped. His investigation progresses at a crawling pace. (Some of the users on Twitter ask him repeatedly about said videos. He appreciates when John informs him of the “block” function.)

The MI6 phone that Mycroft’s begrudgingly procured him sits untouched atop his bedroom desk those entire two weeks. It’s an interesting thing, designed to look like a well-used iPhone 5 to mislead non-agents, though it has none of the functions outside of being able to make and receive calls. It immediately destroys the data of these conversations.

Only one name is programmed into it: Irene Adler.

Sherlock looks at the device several times over those first days, to be sure. Holds it sometimes, tapping the home button and allowing the light to flicker to life. There her name blinks patiently on the screen, awaiting his next move.

He is, admittedly, curious as to why she hasn’t initiated the calls yet herself. Perhaps it’s to draw out his frustration, as she’s covertly done for the past four years. Or maybe the assignment really is as demanding as Secret Service had warned, and she’s too busy infiltrating a circle of European elite to give him any amount of her time. Or maybe she’s already dead.

 _Stop it,_ a part of his mind chides. It’s lazy to assume the extreme. Besides, the thought unsettles him more than he can care to admit.

Perhaps it’s that one bothersome idea that drives him to finally set aside a quiet Sunday evening to shut Twitter – and the door of 221B to clients – to sit in his chair and put the MI6 phone to use.

He lets himself stare at the screen for a moment, indulging in his last few seconds in a world without an Irene Adler to wreak havoc in it. The letters of her name glow brightly and steadily until it’s as if they’ve been branded into his eyes. Finally he taps and lifts it to his ear.

One ring. Two rings. Three. Four.

He guesses she’s recovering from the surprise of hearing her mobile ring.

Five rings. Six. Seven.

Turning the device round in her hand? Debating whether or not to answer him?

Eight rings. Nine.

Finally, a rustle of air and static interrupts the middle of the tenth ring, and he’ll forever deny he feels his heart lurch when he hears her breath as she brings the receiver to her lips.

“I don’t know whether to consider your timing problematic, or impeccable,” Irene says. Her voice is silky and low, so much, too much, like the ghostly voice that had taunted Sherlock in his brother’s office two weeks ago. He grips his armrest for a measure of support.

“Been counting the hours, have you,” he manages to say.

“Sort of,” she replies. The sound of something shifting, like fabric against fabric. “Nice way to keep track of how well I’m doing.”

Sherlock raises an eyebrow. “And just how well _have_ you been doing?”

Irene makes a small laugh. She says nothing for a few seconds, obviously making him wait for her answer. The noise of a plastic lid coming off a container. “I got one.”

He leans forward. “You caught one of the renegades?”

“Yes. Terrence Waters.”

Another swoop of sensation in his chest. It might be disbelief. Or pride. “It’s only been two weeks.”

She hums. “Looks like I’m not the only one keeping time.”

“But how?”

Irene laughs again: clearly she enjoys being on the receiving end of that question. “Our recon man, a French agent, Lucien Palomer. He got a hold of CCTV footage of a soldier known to have been part of Waters’ Syrian entourage. He was in a hotel bar in the west part of Istanbul. There two nights in a row. In the week following that, no appearance. Obviously he’s scouting new clients for the data market, but staying in one place for too long would give him away. So, we determined his pattern and tracked him down to three more upscale haunts in the area in the next days. All in hotels. Obviously Waters would be staying in one of the suites whilst sending down a lackey to pick out clients in the lobby.”

“So you posed as a potential buyer.”

“Well… in a way,” she replies, and Sherlock can hear the smile, taut like a bow, that’s shaped around her voice. “I simply entered in my best dress and let him draw his own conclusions.”

 _Let people’s own weaknesses do her work for her,_ Sherlock deduces her strategy with a rush of satisfaction. He wonders if it would be inappropriate to ask her precisely what her “best dress” looks like, if only to better form the scenario in his head. Going on what little data he has on her, in his mind he sees Irene Adler in the svelte black-as-midnight dress she’d worn while aboard the Bond Air plane.

He has to stop himself, to remember that they are on uncertain terms, and to recall any of their previous meetings with any amount of sentiment would be, in more ways than one, dangerous. Sherlock draws in a quiet, heavy breath, and allows the diorama in his head of that dark evening to dissolve like sand.

“So,” he prompts. “What _were_ his conclusions?”

“I suspected – correctly – that Waters had a camera and mic on his man,” says Irene. “He walked up to me with the most expensive drink off the menu and told me it was from his boss in room 1067.”

“Nicely done,” Sherlock says, genuinely. “But that sort of trick is child’s play to you, isn’t it?”

“You’re much too kind. I’m sure you would’ve piqued his interest just as well yourself.”

Sherlock’s mouth tightens. It could be taken as an acknowledgement of his own skill in strategy, or casual flirting. Could be both. He detests that he can never tell with the woman.

“After that,” Irene continues, then she heaves in effort, as if lifting something, Sherlock raises an eyebrow at the sound, “It was your typical fare. I went up to Terrence Waters’ floor. Predictably he had soldiers standing guard at his door, and I imagine even more inside. I made sure they could notice me entering an entirely different suite. Figured he would take it as a tease so I could lure him away from his guards and into my room.”

“Where you were waiting with a blunt weapon raised over your head.”

“Wasn’t my first time setting up that kind of scene, no,” she says, her voice warm with humor. “Once he was knocked out, I simply had to call in our Turkish contact, Fatma Ayek. In charge of detainment and transportation back to the UK. She’d come and collect him plus the Syrian soldier with spycam footage of me. While she was on her way I passed the time by looking through his mobile.”

“I doubt he’d keep anything of importance on a device he carries with him to a tryst with a stranger.”

“You’d be right. Quite a manicured front: camera roll full of staged photos in front of tourist sites, trying to appear a typical expat. Text conversations with acquaintances that barely discussed anything, just filling the inbox, make it look busy. Oh,” she pauses. “I did find something of interest in his drafts folder. A message with no recipient, reading ‘2000 daire’.” She says it like _dy-reh._ “Sound like anything to you?”

Sherlock frowns. It could be a street address, or a price tag, or even a wine. “Daire” is certainly a Turkish word, but he doesn’t know very much Turkish. It has some loanwords in Serbian, but this is not one of them. “If you could get somewhere with an internet connection you should just – “ on the other end he hears the loud rip of something like paper or plastic. Suddenly all the noises he’d heard before come together into one cohesive image, like blots of wet ink spreading and joining on a sheet. “Wait. Were you injured?”

“No need to panic,” Irene replies, but still Sherlock feels something heavy swell and sink inside him. “Waters had a gun on him when he’d entered my suite; we had a little struggle over it. At one point it went off and a bullet grazed my calf.”

Sherlock holds his mouth tightly shut, restraining himself from blurting all of the kneejerk responses that have rushed up behind his teeth. Internally he berates himself, also, for piecing together so late that her slightly labored breaths and the muted sounds of fabric and plastic all around her meant that she was now currently tending to her wound. Gauze, bandages, bottles of antiseptic. They’d been conversing for several minutes; how had he only realized now? “Your team members should be looking after you.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me, I’m a grown-up,” she chides him. But then she sucks in a sharp, stuttered breath, like she had pressed something against her wound, and Sherlock’s jaw works. She continues after she recovers, “Besides. We’re kept apart to avoid being discovered all at once.”

That gives Sherlock no more comfort. In his head he sees her, still in that glittering black dress, though curled over with her skirt partly hiked up so she can bend her knee and press a cloth to the bleeding. There’d be a track of red starting from midway up her calf (inferring from the quality of her voice and breathing how low she’s leaned over, that’s where the wound should be) leading down to the curve of her ankle, staining the freckles on her skin. Her hair, which he’d at first imagined in a flawless swirl when their call had begun, is disheveled, now that he knows that she’d gotten into a fight. Perhaps her makeup is smudged.

The world around her is a blank white space; he doesn’t know how to imagine the flat that MI6 has stationed her in, besides the vague shape and height of the table she’s probably perched her foot on, laid out her first aid kit. All he knows is that she is alone.

He finds that every angle in his body is tense, and he tries to relax into his chair. “What will you do now?”

“I relayed what information I could to Palomer; he’ll look into it,” Irene says. Again, he hears a smile in her voice, “He and Ayek were rather demoralized when they met me, to tell you the truth. Told me they were looking forward to working with the great Sherlock Holmes.”

He stretches out the fingers of his hand on the armrest. “Would it be rude to reply that I’m glad I’m not there?”

Irene laughs, of course. “It would be honest.” Again he hears a rustle of fabric, most likely the bandage she’s wrapping around her leg. A sharp brush of sound, like she accidentally tugged it too tight – she lets out a hard “ _ah_ ”. Sherlock swallows reflexively for some reason. “Besides, you’re plenty busy yourself. Any progress with Moriarty?”

Sherlock, distracted, only hears her question some seconds after she asked it. He remembers, with some amount of discomfort, that she’s not the only one who’s supposed to be giving updates during these calls. He shifts in his chair. “Some.”

“’Some’ for normal people, or ‘some’ for Sherlock Holmes?”

“Some,” he repeats, with no warmth. “I’ve been focusing on other cases.”

“Oh?” says Irene. “You’ve found more interesting clients?”

“It’s not that they’re _interesting._ It’s that they’re there to be found.”

“What,” she says, not sounding impressed; he won’t admit it irks him, “Sherlock Holmes, now game to take any mundane old case that presents itself in his sitting room?”

“It’s more than that,” he snaps. “You don’t understand. Two weeks ago I thought I’d never be able to have this kind of routine ever again. Meeting clients, screening cases."

"'Routine'," Irene laughs, though it's not cruel, only incredulous. "I thought you were constantly searching for an _escape_ from routine."

"Of course, but when an escape presents itself in the form of a suicide mission - "

Sherlock catches himself when he realizes, a second too late, what territory he was about to enter. He swallows and waits for a reaction: but Irene’s silence comes off as one that is not listening nor waiting. It’s cold, or at the very least, displeased. He doesn’t even hear the sounds of the materials of her first aid kit being used or moved around.

He finds his voice again, several seconds later. “…I don’t mean to seem as if I’m – “ he searches for the right word, “…gloating, or insensitive – “

The sound of her sigh cuts him off. “You don’t need to think up an apology,” she says plainly, “I don’t expect one. I’m quite sure we’re both past using _words_ to hurt each other’s feelings.”

Sherlock automatically opens his mouth to reply, but for several seconds nothing finds its way out of his throat. Finally, he says, “If we’re past that, then where are we now?”

Irene is quiet again for a moment. Then, talking as if each word carries a lead weight, “We’re not anywhere.”

An answer so much like its speaker. Ambiguous, with a measure of distance. But Sherlock doesn’t find himself hurt by the response: like she’d said, they’re past using words to cause each other pain. He does, however, find himself at a loss for words. Again.

Irene seems to sense this. Slowly, she offers up, “Tell me about the last case you solved.”

Sherlock blinks and, to his own bewilderment, finds himself relaxing. “Client on Twitter.”

“ _Twitter?_ ” Irene interrupts, sounding both baffled and delighted.

“Yes.” He frowns. “Is there something funny about Twitter?”

“No, no,” she says quickly. “…have you followed me?”

“What?”

“Go on.”

“An elderly woman thought a hitman had moved in across the street and was watching her from the window opposite hers, but no one would believe her. Sent me a photo of the view.”

“Let me guess. It was her own reflection in the glass?”

“Actually, no. It really was a hitman, hired by one of her children greedy for his inheritance money. Paid him to wear a wig and a dress and mirror whatever movements his mother made, just so that any photos she took of him from the window wouldn’t be believable. I got the police sent over within twenty minutes.”

There’s silence on the other end for a few seconds. Then Irene lets out a bright peal of laughter. Sherlock sits uncomfortably still in his chair, unable to respond.

“I shouldn’t have expected any less,” she says fondly. “Trouble always seems to find you.”

And _she_ always seems to find trouble. Sherlock's throat feels dry. He coughs to try and clear it. “So it does.”

“But that’s how you like it, isn’t it?”

 _You would know._ The response that comes to him immediately, as if on impulse, sits behind his teeth. But he can’t let himself say it. Still, it feels as if Irene had read his mind and seen what he wanted to retort. She doesn’t say anything, either, for a long time.

“I’ve got to go.” Clears her throat. “Shall I be the one to call you then, the next time?”

“Sure.” A pause. “Careful with your injury.”

“Sherlock,” says Irene. The word transports him to the last time she had uttered his first name in such a way.

It is – a complicated memory. He doesn’t give it any time to take solid form in his mind.

It doesn’t seem appropriate to conclude the conversation with “goodbye”. It’s not a word either of them know how to use lightly.

Soon as he pulls the mobile from his ear and ends the call, the image of her sitting in her blank white world falls away, and he is left alone again in dim, warm quiet of 221B.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's not lying when he says he's made "some" progress. More on that next chapter. :) See you all Sunday!


	4. Expansion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A disclaimer of sorts: I spent months tearing my hair out over thinking up a believable explanation for how indeed the Moriarty video showed up on every single screen in England. Pair that with the despair of believing that whatever I came up with, it would be wrong by the time S4 aired. Lo and behold when The Six Thatchers premiered, and... they never explained it; we just have to trust Eurus Holmes was just _that_ brilliant. Unfortunately, I am not, so writing a theory that an intelligent man might come up with to explain his even more intelligent sister's feat required a lot of inelegant hoop-jumping on my part. Apologies in advance if you work in mass comm or broadcasting technology.
> 
> On another note: the second half of this chapter features adult content.
> 
> Thank you everyone for continuing to read and comment. Enjoy!

Irene Adler is doing well enough.

Her limp today is less severe, so she can maneuver from the battered couch in her grayed but clean Istanbul flat to the tiny kitchen to make a cup of tea, then all the way back half a minute quicker than the day before. A minor feat to record, but it’s still something to occupy her thoughts with while waiting for word back from Lucien Palomer on his findings. They warn you a lot about the danger and uncertainty to be found in suicide missions, but they never seem to mention the tedium.

The view across from her second-floor window is of a gas station, a pharmacy, a smoky eatery. Not far down the road is a preschool. Secret Service has her in a safe, sunny residential area of Istanbul, far from the often dangerous bustle of the city center, but not so quiet that the sudden moving-in of a mysterious female foreigner might raise any eyebrows.

MI6 had given her the name and papers of Sofia von Benning, a fictional Swedish aristocrat, for when the time comes that she must blend in with the other elite in the data market, but for now, something less flashy will do. (Besides, she’s always liked her own aliases better). Her landlord thinks she’s a shy graduate student, and her neighbors whisper she is a district official’s mistress, tucked away in a place he can easily reach.

She does her best to act the part and keep them unsuspicious, whenever she’s sure they’re watching. When she greets the landlord’s wife, who is sweeping up leaves on the gravel pathway to the building. When she pushes her key into her door, kicking the dirt off the heels of her boots. In the privacy of her flat, she practices the lowering of this graduate student’s eyes and the creep of her smile, even as she holds a government-issued mobile device to her ear.

“Satellites.”

“Pardon?” Irene lowers her cup to its mismatched saucer on the coffee table.

“You asked me what my entry point was for the Moriarty case,” Sherlock’s voice announces through the phone. He sounds animated and even a little breathless. “It’s satellites.”

This is their third call in a week. To Irene’s pleasure, his mood seems to improve each time (no matter how much he denies it), and she’s determined to keep the trajectory pointing upward. She’d gathered enough cues from their very first conversation to figure out what topics the man was willing to touch on and what repelled him: she’s surprised, or maybe she shouldn’t be, that Jim Moriarty is one of them. She’s avoided mentioning his name since then.

Not that their calls have been so dull without him. Sherlock is eager enough to tell her about the cases he receives on Twitter, and how it takes him only a minute to solve each. The stories entertain her more than she’ll admit. It helps that he often describes some area of London in detail to help orient her, and she can close her eyes and see the brick of the buildings, the white and yellow lines painted on the concrete road.

“What _about_ satellites?” she asks, reminding herself that she is several miles, and one unfinished undercover assignment, away from returning to those brick buildings.

“The Moriarty video was broadcasted to virtually every working screen in London,” Sherlock explains, “The billboards in Piccadilly Circus, tellies in pubs. Obviously that would mean the broadcaster utilized multiple sources to access them. Analog, digital. Satellites. Client on Twitter gave me the idea. Said an enemy was deliberately interrupting her satellite dish’s signal – turns out he’d stuck a pin in her cable cord, by the way.”

“But there are dozens of broadcast providers, and several satellites in orbit. What one thing could have penetrated every TV screen in the country, regardless of what channel someone was tuned to?”

“Not one thing, but two. The vessel and the parcel.”

“The satellite and the video file?”

“It’s the satellite and the vi-“ Sherlock stops himself, and is quiet for a moment, as if in shock. “…Yes. That’s right.”

He continues after recovering, “…Every message transmitted from a broadcaster is first scrambled before it’s sent up to a satellite, then back down to a receiver. For pay-only channels, there’s even an additional layer of encryption. Only customers who’ve paid would have the right technology needed to unscramble said message and display it on a screen. We’re looking at a video file encrypted well enough that it bypasses that decoding stage, but at the same time open enough that it overrides whatever message was originally meant to be unscrambled by the receiver.”

“Datastream hacks are notoriously difficult,” Irene cuts in, “The few semi-successful attempts were nearly a decade ago and they made history. And those were just by computer science students looking to get free television. This is a hunt for some virtual genius.”

“Well it’s a good thing I’m on the case, isn’t it?” Sherlock deadpans. He’s been acting rather cocky ever since he’s started taking clients again. Irene knows the responsible thing would be to warn him to tone it down, but she finds she can’t help but smile. It’s just so him.

“Alright, so the Moriarty file has the power to override all these things,” Irene says, “But you’d still need to have intercepted a broadcaster’s signal to its satellites to get it transmitted anywhere.”

“Or intercepted the satellite itself.”

Irene raises an eyebrow. “You’re suggesting the culprit took control of a giant machine orbiting the planet in outer space.”

“I checked. There are thirteen satellites in orbit that service the UK and Ireland. They’d have had quite a range of choices.”

“But only a handful of those are in use. The others are deactivated - dead, floating in space.”

“Not _deactivated._ Just _not active_ ,” Sherlock corrects, sounding energized. “The heavy duty work is delegated to their newer satellites, but the others are left functioning in case they ever need backup. So out of the thirteen satellites in orbit for the UK, ten of them are dormant, but powered, waiting for transmissions.” She hears a shift of a chair, as if he’s just relaxed back into it. He continues, more calmly, “All of those satellites come from a brand named Astra. They were built and launched by a global broadcasting operator called SES S.A., based in Betzdorf, Luxembourg. I plan to visit it sometime soon.”

It’s Irene’s turn to be in awed silence. “You may actually beat my time.”

A pause. “I wasn’t aware we were racing each other.”

“Oh, we’re not. I’m just competitive.” Irene makes a sound of effort as she pulls a battered laptop out from underneath the couch and lays it on the coffee table. “What do you expect to gain from interrogating the lovely people at SES, though? Surely they wouldn’t give such sensitive information to just any stranger who knocks at their door.”

“Please. If they’re anything like MI6 – whose apparent carelessness was what enabled you to find out about the mission that you’re currently on – I’ll easily learn what I need to know from an hour’s stay and make my exit right after.”

“A voluntary exit, I hope,” she quips as she boots up the old, but sturdy laptop. She’d been able to snap some photos of different screens from Terrence Waters’ mobile to study afterwards. She clicks through the shots of his exchanges with his acquaintances: invitations to dinner, small talk about the beauty of Istanbul, consistent with his front as a wealthy expatriate. _I feel as if the city’s most alive at high noon or late into the night,_ he boringly tells a contact whose name she can’t quite make out, _There is no dusk or dawn on the clock of Istanbul._

“You’re awfully critical of MI6,” she continues as she looks through the photos, “Surely the technology SES uses for its satellite broadcasts is as sophisticated as the tech that allows us to speak with each other on these phones?”

“I would hope so. God forbid the country’s foreign intelligence agency has some outdated cell tower camouflaged out in the woods.”

Irene laughs. “Or maybe they’d go for the unexpected, knowing that enemy would first look to the sky for some top secret satellite floating in space?”

“It’d still be stupid to have one. Communications towers can only reach so far. Their signals travel in straight lines. The curvature of the Earth doesn’t allow them to transmit to faraway places, like foreign countries. Hence the need for technology not tied to the ground.”

“Well said,” Irene says, still smiling, “Especially for someone who doesn’t otherwise have any care for outer space.”

“Please,” Sherlock says disdainfully, “People with no better use for their brainpower grossly exaggerated a single sentence on one of John’s ancient blog posts. I only don’t care about things that have no effect on what happens on this planet. Like the name of this constellation or the distance of that galaxy or whatever else strangers on the street try to challenge me with.” He pauses, then says in a voice dripping with derision, as if he’s insulted he has to announce it, “ _Obviously_ I would know that the Earth isn’t flat.”

“Do people really come up to you and ask that?” A window pops up on Irene’s laptop, a message from Lucien Palomer on the private chat program he’d created and passed to her and Fatma Ayek. _Did you try to log into our database? Got a password request,_ it reads, but she closes the tab. She can easily deal with it later.

“Well. Mostly children. When they recognize me they come running and ask things like ‘how big is the whole wide universe?’” he says it in a mocking, high-pitched tone, but Irene only finds it charming. He grumbles, “You’d think they’d be more understanding when I explain that I couldn’t give a damn about questions of no consequence.”

“You want to know what _I_ think?”

“That’s a good example of one. You’re going to tell me what you think anyway.”

That makes her grin. She goes on, “I don’t think you dislike questions of no consequence. I think you dislike questions that have no set answer.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock says, “All questions have answers. Otherwise, they’re not questions, they’re nonsense.”

 “But it’s true. There is no one simple answer when one asks how big the universe is.” Irene leans back into the couch, taking a sip of her tea. Oh, it’s gone cold. How long have they been talking? “It’s so large that applying our own earthly understanding of distance won’t ever work. You know, Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

“I know the theory,” snaps Sherlock. Well of course he would, Irene thinks as she braves the rest of her tepid tea. The man is unconventional, but she’d been able to learn long ago that he had in fact gone to university. Surely at one point he had to remember it for some minor exam. Still, the image of Sherlock Holmes gritting his teeth through dull professors’ lectures and walking stone-faced through a campus of enthusiastic freshmen and boisterous varsity fans amuses her more than she’ll ever say. He continues, “Perception of time is relative.”

“Yes,” Irene says, “What happens immediately in one point in the universe might happen a million years later in another. That’s why we can look up and see stars that no longer exist. And why you can’t simply stretch a ruler from one end of the universe to the other. They’re not only miles apart, but eons apart.”

“Very poetic,” Sherlock deadpans, “Still doesn’t change the fact that such trivia has no application in our immediate surroundings.”

Irene hums. “Not necessarily true. I’d argue there’s a difference even between you and me, where we are now. Every word I say into this mobile reaches you a fraction of a second after the fact.”

“Caused by limitations in technology, not by great distance.”

“It’s still distance. I only mean it’s a way of understanding our current situation.”

“Which I believe you determined to be ‘not anywhere’,” Sherlock says, his tone giving way to hints of irritation.

Irene is taken aback by it. She suspects she’s teased him too much. “I just meant, in comparison to the last time we were in the same place – “

She knows it was a mistake to bring it up as she says it. Immediately her mouth snaps shut, the same time a sickening chill wracks her body.

Sherlock says nothing for several seconds. Irene considers it a more discomforting reaction than if he’d immediately cut her off with some scathing retort.

After a moment, he says, in an unsettling rumble, “You were saying?”

Irene exhales. “Nothing. Never mind.” She notices her fingers are still wrapped around her empty cup. She lets go. “I’ll call you again when something interesting happens.”

Silence again. She wonders if he’s about to object to what she said. She stares at the screen of her bulky laptop; its glow is dimmed from inactivity.

“Fine,” he says, tightly.

That’s enough for Irene; she takes the mobile from her ear and switches it off. She lets out another breath as she sets it down next to the laptop. A slant of warm daylight throws itself across the tabletop, its angle bent out of direction by the surfaces of the two devices.

It’s sunset, she realizes with numbed surprise. The end of one day further into this assignment. Or maybe one day closer to home.

The light is orange, unusually deep. A sign, she’d learned once as a child, that tomorrow will be a hot day.

* * *

_Four Years Earlier_

Irene Adler is alive.

It is the very first thought that comes to her as she blinks awake, sprawled and uncomfortable on the thin mattress. When she peels her hand away from her collarbone, the skin there is sticky and covered in sweat.

To be fair, all of her is drenched. The heat in this motel on the outermost stretch of Karachi is unbearable, and the scorching glow of dawn creeps into the room and tints the walls red, despite the thin curtains being drawn closed and the door shut tight.

Beside her, Sherlock shifts. Irene freezes.

This is their third, and last, morning together. It doesn’t feel like it, though. For the past three days she’s drifted in and out of a thick and drug-like sleep, exhausted from the shootout that resulted from her rescue from the terrorist cell, stirred awake only by the occasional clatter of utensils and a plate of bland food onto the top of the bedside drawer. Whenever she’d open her eyes to them, he’d have already moved out of sight and out of the motel room. To meet with the people who are to stage what needs to look like her death, she suspects. Or to arrange for the boat that’s to take her out of Pakistan. She doesn’t know. Whenever she asks in her drowsy state, he only tells her the same thing. “Rest.”

In the times she does wake and catch him inside the motel room, he’ll be in the desk chair, pulled out to face the door, the copper light outlining his rigid posture. To stand guard, she imagines. For what, she can only speculate about for a moment before she falls back asleep.

Now, it seems that, finally, he’s succumbed to his fatigue and allowed himself to lie down beside her in the bed, though to his credit he’s at the very edge of it. His arm is thrown over his eyes to shield them from the intense glow of the hot Karachi desert that pervades even in the night. He’s wearing the same clothes they’d arrived at this motel in: a white t-shirt and black trousers, though at least he’s shed the hooded disguise, and his shoes and socks. In the dim light she can see the same amount of sweat coating his skin as hers.

Beneath them both, the bedsheet is wrinkled and twisted, nearly nudged off the bed from all of their groggy tossing and turning to cope with the heat. She wonders if she should wake him, if only to have just one proper conversation before they part at sunrise.

It turns out just a moment later that she doesn’t need to. Sherlock stirs as if disturbed; she watches silently as he lifts his arm. His face, still and tired, takes form in the darkness. He blinks and looks lazily to her.

For a long time they do nothing, lying on their backs, but their faces turned toward each other, only inches apart. He hasn’t flinched or moved away; he doesn’t seem embarrassed to have been discovered like this. Both Irene’s hands are resting on her stomach, and she resists the urge to bunch the fabric of her black shift into her fists.

Sherlock blinks slowly a few more times. Then he says, “How long have you been awake?”

Irene feels the need to swallow before she can locate her voice. “Not long.” Her eyes travel down the length of his body then back up. “How long have you been asleep?”

“Not long.”

Irene doesn’t respond to that. Sherlock draws in a long, deep breath, then turns away to comb his fingers through his hair, to push it off his sweat-soaked forehead. Some of Irene’s long hair is clinging to her neck and she itches to do the same, but for some reason she feels as if she were on a minefield, and any small movement could set off a bomb.

Sherlock drops his hand back to bed with a heavy thump, his eyes still on the ceiling. “My contact arrives here six AM. He’s to drive us to the bay. Your papers, and a custodian’s uniform, are in my bag.” He does a tired little jerk of his head towards the motel desk, where his sand-dusted duffel sits. “You can take a look if you want.”

Irene doesn’t lift her head to see it. Sherlock doesn’t seem to expect her to; he turns back to face her, serious, calm. They’re both moving so slowly. To minimize the production of body heat in this furnace of a motel room, partly.

She takes in her own inhale before speaking. “Thank you.” Deep, slow. She infuses it with enough emphasis that it might communicate what she means – it’s more than a thank you for the fake papers, or the clothes. It’s a thank you for everything else.

“You’re welc-“

“Why did you do it?”

Sherlock’s expression is unchanged; Irene can see it even in the murky darkness. He expected this question. Prepared for it, even. She knows she’s about to receive a scripted answer.

“What you did in London certainly warranted an exile, but nothing you’ve done warrants an execution. It’d be a shame to waste a mind like yours, stupid as some of its decisions have been. Its store of knowledge and intuition of human behavior will be put to good use somewhere, someday. The specifics should be up to you and you alone.”

Detached and diplomatic. His brother would have been proud.

She doesn’t respond immediately, and he doesn’t seem unsettled by her silence. He knows how practiced that answer sounds, and he knows that she knows. Perhaps the look his face has now, one that’s set and heavy-lidded, is a request that she doesn’t point it out, for both their sakes.

“I see,” Irene says softly. She shifts to pull her hair away from her neck, and doesn’t miss the way his eyes briefly flick down to watch. “Any other pointers, professor?” she asks, a little wryly.

His lips tighten. An acknowledgement of the humor, though he doesn’t find it all that funny. “No. None.” Irene feels the bed sheet beneath her pulled as the man moves his entire body, as if beginning to turn away. “You needn’t think of my opinion any longer.”

“I will always think of you,” she says, serious.

The pulling of the bed sheet stops. Out the window, some heavy cloud moves in to veil the orange light of the sky, throwing the room into a deeper darkness so that she can’t see his current expression.

She doesn’t regret saying it. It’s only the truth. Months ago in his brother’s house he’d uncovered a harsher, more humiliating version of it.

Now she’s admitting it on her terms. And if this is the last time they are to see each other, she’s determined to leave this motel room without a shred of regret.

After an eternity, she feels the bed move again, the mattress dipping. “I’ll let you sleep,” he says, stilted, clipped.

“Sherlock,” she says, and reaches in the darkness to wrap her fingers around his arm. It’s tense, slightly damp with his sweat.

As if on command, at her touch he maneuvers fully back onto the bed, and she feels his muscles shift under her palm as he turns to face her. She can’t quite see him, but the warmth of his closeness gives her an accurate enough image. For what feels like a full minute, they remain this way, twisted from the waist up to listen to each other’s breathing.

It’s impossible to tell in the darkness who moves forward first. Initially Irene misaims and her lips land against the corner of his, but he turns just so to remedy the error.

Their mouths mold to each other, wet and hot. She slides her hand up to wrap around the back of his neck. He mirrors her, gathering a fistful of her hair.

Her tongue pushes into his mouth and he gives a shaky exhale, pressing her face even closer to his. What he lacks in precision he makes up for in eagerness – impatience, almost. The hotness of their gasps added to the already stifling desert climate makes Irene feel like she could suffocate.

She puts her hand on his shoulder and eases him towards her. He tenses for a heartbeat, but moves until he’s hovering over her, knees at her sides, while she lies flat on her back, their kiss never breaking. Both his hands still reverently cup the back of her head. Irene can’t hear their gasps over the drumming of her own heart in her ears. She squeezes her eyes shut and loses herself.

They kiss sloppily, desperately for what feels like an eternity. Even when Irene’s lips are sore and swollen she can’t stop pressing to him. Sherlock pushes back persistently, his hands tight in her hair, the breaths through his nose harsh and loud. They kiss mindlessly for so long it’s as if they’re only trying to distract themselves from the punishing heat.

When she reaches to cup his erection, already full and straining against his trousers, he lets out a voiceless grunt, muffled by the seal of their mouths. It seems to flip a switch, and suddenly they’re tearing ferociously at each other’s clothes as if they have only minutes rather than hours. The well-studied process of undressing is reduced to inelegant, incomplete thoughts. Dress, over the head. Yank up the hem of the shirt. Belt, buckle, zip.

When they’re totally bare she pulls his chest down to hers. They’re both covered in perspiration, so he slides up against her hard enough that she feels his cock graze her thighs. In the darkness she can hear the fast, uneven breaths escaping his lips. Their warmth hits the skin of her collarbones, her neck. In the same way that images and sounds can be recorded, she wishes there were a way to capture and save feeling. To replay and to slow it down.

She stretches to mouth the edge of his jaw just under his ear. He gasps, distracted, so she shoves him back against his side of the bed and straddles his hips. He goes so easily it’s as if he’d wanted to do it himself – Irene smiles at the thought as she sinks her nails into his chest, and his fingers tighten at her thighs.

His touch is light, trembling. It says everything he wants to say. Help me. Tell me what to do. Give me what you will give me. He traces up her stomach, to the skin just beneath her breasts, as if every inch of him aches. And despite the fact that it’s nothing Irene has never felt before, she _shivers._ Sherlock feels it at his fingertips, she knows. He slips a hand between her legs and she must let her eyes fall shut a moment.

She rocks into his touch for a while, sighing, and she can see through her narrowed gaze that Sherlock is watching her movement hungrily as he circles her clit, eyes glinting. She bends down to crush her mouth over his, grabbing his wrist to pull his fingers away from her legs, while her other hand reaches to take a tight grasp of his cock. It’s hot, twitching against her palm, and she runs her thumb over the head of it. He shudders and murmurs a word into her mouth – she decides it’s a plea.

She sinks down heavily onto him, just as his hips rise off the bed: two asteroids colliding.

The moment Irene envelops all of him she drops her palms to brace them on either side of his shoulders. At the same time Sherlock has tipped his head back, his whole body tense, his arms shaking as he clutches her thighs. Had this happened anywhere else, like in the luxurious safety of her Belgravia flat, she would’ve taken a picture of the look on his face. As it is, they are in a dim, sweltering Karachi motel. She settles for pitching her hips forward to hear him gasp.

She rides him hard and fast into the flimsy mattress, the bedframe creaking audibly as they go. He grunts with every thrust upward, nails digging into her hips, her arse, though his grip is slippery at best when they’re both so soaked in sweat. The rumpled bed sheet bunches around Irene’s knees like ripples, their peaks growing higher and sharper as she grows rougher in her lunges, grows lost in the throbs of pleasure. A storm upon an otherwise silent sea.

Without warning Sherlock wraps his arms around her waist and sits up, pushing his lips to hers immediately. It shifts the angle of him inside her, and she moans at how her muscles change the way they pulse around him, and he whines as he blindly drives himself deeper into the new contact, and isn’t _that_ a sound she’ll treasure forever. There’s no calculation or strategy now to the way they move against each other; it’s just whatever gets them more, more, more.

Irene’s hair is a wild mess, some locks falling over her back, others clinging to Sherlock’s sticky neck and jaw where they had clashed when they kissed. She’s rising and plunging down even faster now; he reciprocates with upward thrusts that have grown frantic. With effort she extracts her hand from his hair to reach down and bring herself off as they writhe together.

Sherlock comes first. He cries out a sound that begins like her name but is cut off as his teeth sink into his own lip. In his suddenly vice-like hold Irene has less space to move, but she fastens one hand to his shoulder and the other to his knee, tilts backwards, and rides him mercilessly to her own orgasm – his teeth leave his bottom lip and his shout continues.

Seconds later, the pleasure that’s coiled and tightened inside her releases itself and blooms outward, and for a long moment it’s all she knows. In her daze she thinks she feels Sherlock drop his face to her chest, crushing his mouth to the skin above her breast where her heartbeat can be felt.

They collapse together back onto the bed. Irene’s head lands on Sherlock’s chest, which is heaving so quickly and deeply she’s almost dizzy. Their legs are in a tangle, though Irene vaguely senses that one of her hands is entwined with his. The heat is unbearable.

Sooner than she’d expected it, Sherlock’s breaths slow to a quiet, languid pace, like he’s drifting off into sleep.

Sooner than she’d expected it, she rises up off him and moves to the side.

Their hands remain locked. She looks at it for a while: their fingers woven together, the smallness of her palm when resting over his. The tightness. She didn’t expect how tightly they were holding each other. In her periphery, she senses something, and with unease she pulls her eyes from their hands to look at Sherlock’s face.

He is still awake. Face slack and eyes tired, nearly closed, but still awake. He’s watching her. Wondering what she’s going to do, obviously. A plane of light against his cheek shows how it’s still shining with sweat.

The bed sheet underneath them is still a mess. Tiny mountain ranges from where they had pushed and pulled, the ripples where Irene’s knees had sunken on either side of his body. Like a history of sex and all the secret desperation that came with it, written into cloth. It will be erased so easily, soon.

Irene meets his stare for a moment – then she flicks her eyes upward to his bag on the desk – the one containing her fake papers and change of clothes. She looks back to him.

They’re still holding hands. They don’t look away from each other, not for one second. Not even as Sherlock’s eyes begin to droop, weighed down by all the sheer exhaustion from the past three days, and not even as Irene feels like she might burst into flames from their shared gaze.

When two asteroids collide, sometimes the impact is so great that both rocks shatter into several pieces that hurl off into the dark, and leave nothing, not even themselves, in their wake, only silence.

Did he let go? Did she pull away? Did it happen simultaneously? Who can say?

Freed, Irene watches an unnamable expression flicker in Sherlock’s eyes as they fall closed. He is asleep within seconds.

She takes the things in Sherlock’s bag that are meant for her and leaves.

As she escapes the motel lot, heading back towards the city rather than down to the bay, Irene reminds herself of the vow she’d made on that tiny bed: that she would leave that darkened, secret room without a shred of regret. None.


	5. A New Star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My friends, your kind comments and our interesting discussions have helped me through a rather tough week. :) I sound like a broken record in these things, but believe me when I say: thank you, thank you.
> 
> Minor warning: a brief, one-sentence mention of suicide in this chapter.
> 
> Enjoy!

For the next several days, Sherlock Holmes shuts out everything that could possibly be considered a distraction.

It’s not difficult: he and John receive a deluge of new cases after word spreads that the Hat Detective is back in Baker Street. Suddenly his clients transform from pixelated icons back into real, flesh-made human beings at his doorstep (his Twitter notifications still blow up every now and then, to be fair). The Yard falls back into its rhythm of running into dead ends and (begrudgingly) turning to him for assistance.

The MI6 mobile sits silent and untouched on one of the high shelves where the Watsons never look. Since their last call, it hasn’t rung once.

He solves cases faster than he can keep track of, though John is at least helpful enough to devise catchy blog titles to categorize them by. The fake corpse filled with sand becomes _The Dusty Death._ The dismembered one becomes _The Circus Torso._ The strangled one is _The Cardiac Arrest._ Plenty of corpses, to be sure. Just like old times.

They don’t, as Sherlock had once hypothesized and hoped, reveal a trail of crumbs by the underground criminal network that lead to a phantom Moriarty. It’s no wonder, he thinks, one cool evening as he’s slumped in his chair, violin tucked lazily under his chin, that he’s no longer looking to the ground to find him, but to the stars.

Satellites. It’s one thing when your clue is invisible, like a scent or a sound. It’s another when it’s an object not perceived on Earth at all. It’s not an ideal scenario for a man who trusts his senses above what any police report or witness account tells him. Still, he’s more than motivated to conquer it. He tries to remember, as he absently pulls at a single violin string, if Mycroft still owns that 8-inch aperture compound telescope gifted to him by some generous but characterless member of the royal family.

Sherlock plucks at the string once more as he thinks, but the sound it plays is strangely off-key. He frowns, too deep in thought to look at the instrument directly, and plucks it again – it’s high-pitched, staccato. Odd. Why would a string sound like a ringing phone?

Sherlock abruptly sits forward, pulling the violin out from under his chin and setting it on the armrest. He twists at the waist to look at the device sitting on his bookshelf.

It’s right where he’d abandoned it, sounding out that single, terrible, wrong key, patiently awaiting his responding note.

It takes him another moment to stand up from his chair and walk over. It’s no trick of his mind: the screen blinks insistently in the shadows with the name of the one contact programmed into it, the name he’d avoided thinking about over the course of several days.

He contemplates not answering it. Let it ring till she suspects he’s not home or, more likely, she understands he’s ignoring her.

But he isn’t, is he? Here he is, standing at attention before her, summoned by the sound of a ringtone. Just like old times.

After ten rings he picks up. Once they connect, he vaguely hears the rush of wind, the soft rumble of a sleeping city. She’s outdoors. Peculiar. “Isn’t it unsafe to call from outside your base – “

“Palomer is dead,” comes her whispered voice.

Sherlock forgets the rest of his question. He recognizes the name Palomer: the French agent assigned to recon. Irene had been working alongside him. “What?”

“The two other lieutenants,” answers Irene, “They found where he was stationed and sent people to get him. He probably suspected they would torture him for information, because he wiped his computer blank when he heard them at the door. Then he swallowed a pill. His handler in France told us about an hour ago.”

She states it so matter-of-factly, like a progress report at an office meeting. Sherlock imagines he would put up the same front if it were him in her shoes. Still, some aspects of her voice betray her: the low volume, the slight tremor she’s trying to hide. She’s shivering. She’s cold.

He pushes that line of thought away and continues, “But how did they locate _him?_ It was you and Ayek who’d come in contact with Waters that night at the hotel.”

“I think it was the note in Water’s phone. ‘2000 daire.’ It must be some part of a code, or a password. I’d passed it on to Palomer to research. Maybe Waters’ people detected an unknown user searching the phrase and traced it to his computer.” A pause, and then she laughs quietly. “I think he tried to warn me, but I’d brushed it off.”

Sherlock doesn’t see the humor in that. “What are you doing, calling me now, then. Shouldn’t you be busy running for your life?”

“I’m easily capable of doing both simultaneously,” says Irene. “I’ve been ordered by MI6 to flee my old base and hide somewhere outside the country for an indefinite amount of time. Ayek will do the same. We’re not to inform each other where we’re headed. To, you know, avoid ending up in the same situation as Palomer.”

“Outside the country?” is what demands most of Sherlock’s attention. “Where are you going?”

“To the same place I always go in times I need to hide – which, you can imagine, is often.” She stops talking for a moment and he hears a muted patter of footsteps, as if she’s stepping aside to let someone walk by her. The next time her voice returns, it’s a little lower, more echoed, like she’d cupped a hand over her mobile. “I have a home in Tivat, Montenegro. I’m at the train station now.”

“You’re taking the train?”

“With a Frenchman doing recon, it’s certain they know international agents are investigating. Shield and Browning will have men watching the airports. I have to make my exit as quietly as I can.”

“And _quickly_ ,” Sherlock cuts in. “A train ride won’t ensure you that.”

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Holmes.” A minor quaver in her voice now, like she’s walking on uneven terrain. No, that’s not right, she’s in a train station. Her leg must still be recovering, and she’s limping slightly. “It’ll be fast enough. It’s only a straight line from here to Tivat.” She laughs for no obvious reason, again. “A curved line, rather.”

Sherlock’s hand on the edge of the bookshelf tightens. “What would you even do there?”

“What I’ve mastered doing. I’ll wait.” A huff of breath, as if she’s hitching a bag higher onto her shoulder. On his end, it doesn’t sound heavy. How many things is she bringing along with her? “I’m not allowed to investigate anything until I’m summoned back into Istanbul. We have to let them think Palomer’s colleagues have fled and their case is abandoned.”

“You realize, then, that you’re risking something by phoning me and reporting all this.”

His tone, at least, makes Irene pause for a moment. Then she replies, “A promise is a promise, Mr. Holmes.” She’s called him that twice, now. Despite the fact that they’d achieved something resembling a first-name basis again in their last few conversations. “I only have instructions to cease contact with Fatma Ayek, not with my friend tucked safe and tidy and warm in the heart of London.”

His mouth tightens at her use of logic. And, truth be told, her choice of words. “Friend” seems all at once far too little – and far too _much_ – to describe what it is that they are. “You’re being too calm about this.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be. Everything’s happening at the pace one would expect for a suicide mission.” Sherlock screws his eyes shut at the term. It irks him when she calls it that. “A breakthrough just a few days in, boosts everyone’s morale. Then some sort of catastrophe to bring us back down to earth, several days later. All this in in a matter of weeks. Sounds about right.”

Sherlock remembers, briefly, her saying that Mycroft had predicted she would last four months into this assignment. He hears a sharp, overloud gust of breath, as if she’d exhaled warm air into her chilled hands. Is she even wearing a coat? How much of a hurry was she in when she’d fled her flat?

Irene seems to interpret his silence as coldness. She breathes once more into her hands, then says quietly, “I’ll call you soon as I arrive in Tivat.”

Sherlock swallows. It loses him the chance to respond: the next thing he hears is a rush of air as Irene takes the mobile from her ear, which is swallowed into a flat, continuous electronic tone. She’d hung up.

He pulls the device away to stare at the screen. The blank white light lingers for only a few seconds before it dies out.

Sherlock flexes his fingers over it once, twice. He considers switching it back on and calling her again – but she won’t answer, obviously, he tells himself right after. Drawing in a breath that’s suddenly painful, he puts the mobile back on the bookshelf, and it smacks louder against the wood than expected.  His arm feels tense, and his legs feel locked in place.

He doesn’t know why he’s angry. She’s doing exactly as she’s been ordered; in fact, she’s doing it to keep herself safe. What does it matter that it lengthens the assignment indefinitely? She’ll be quiet and keep her head low, like she always has. It’s what she’s good at.

His mobile – his actual mobile – buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out to see: it’s a text from John, with a new case. Something about jellyfish.

Fine, he’ll take it then, Sherlock thinks, and suddenly his legs feel free to move again, though that sinking feeling inside him lingers. He needs a few hours’ distraction.

* * *

It’s a few more hours’ distraction than he’d expected, Sherlock thinks to himself, as he, John, and a heavily pregnant Mary barrel in through the pale green doors of the emergency room.

Well of _course_ they couldn’t just let her give birth in a car on the side of a busy London road, especially on a cold night like this one. They’d pulled over and helped Mary (and themselves) to calm down, and then John drove the few more agonizing blocks to a nearby hospital.

The three tumble towards the reception desk, where a mildly frightened resident leans back in her office chair to regard them.

“Hi,” says John, breathless, “We’ve got an, er, the – “ he gives up on words and points a finger at his wife, who has one hand on the edge of the desk and the other on her nine-month-round belly, continue to suck in deep, loud breaths.

The resident recovers, and nods quickly, “Yes, right away. There are, ah, wheelchairs over there for the lady.”

“I don’t need one, I’m in labor, not bloody paralyzed,” Mary hisses in protest, even as Sherlock comes up pushing a wheelchair behind her, and she falls back heavily into it.

“Probably just plan to charge us for it,” John says, sounding cross, though he pats Mary’s hand on the armrest.

“Oh, Christ.” Mary rolls her eyes. Sherlock’s begun to push her forward, and the three of them are led by a doctor towards the delivery ward. “This better be the best baby in the world for all the trouble she’s put us through. The greatest, most fantastic baby.”

“Yeah,” John rubs the back of his head, “All the work we’ve put in? She’ll never cry at night.”

Mary manages a laugh. “Be up and walking at two weeks old.”

“Change her own nappies.”

“Can they really learn to do that?” asks Sherlock.

“Can – no, Sherlock,” says John.

A nurse whose cap and mask covers most of his face stretches his arm out across the door into the delivery ward. “So sorry, Ma’am, family members only.”

John waves impatiently. “Yeah, hey, I’m – “

“My husband,” Mary finishes.

The nurse nods at him, then points a finger at Sherlock. “And you’re her – “

“Sherlock,” interrupts Mary, flapping a hand. “He’s my Sherlock. It’s fine.”

“Er,” says the nurse, “That’s not, um – “

“It’s alright,” Sherlock takes a step back, releasing the handles of the wheelchair. “I’ll wait here.”

The nurse pushes the door open for them, just as Mary turns to face him. “We’ll see you soon.”

He nods. “All three of you.”

Mary gives a small smile at that, while John claps his shoulder and says, “Don’t run off for a murder while we’re in here, could you?”

A corner of Sherlock’s mouth ticks upwards. “Not for a triple homicide.”

“I don’t trust you!” Mary calls out. That response earns a double-take and a horrified look from the nurse, but then the doors swing closed behind the Watsons, and that’s the last thing Sherlock sees.

There isn’t much activity he can make out through the frosted window of the door, so soon enough he gives up and strides over to a row of chairs attached to the wall, and sinks into the one farthest from all the other waiting families. A promise is a promise.

Staring at his shoes gets old after a while, so he looks up to observe the hallway instead. How long does childbirth even take? He vaguely remembers his mother scolding him and Mycroft when they were children, _I spent twelve hours in labor for you,_ but he’s sure that was an exaggeration. Almost sure.

Hospital staff scurry past him, the next indistinguishable from the last in their mint-green scrubs. There are scraps of information to be found in the creases of their shirts or the redness of their eyes, but Sherlock doesn’t bother reading the strings of data that rise off them as they walk by. Nothing to study, nothing to be excited about.

“What about that nurse by the gurney,” Irene murmurs next to him, “Been pocketing prescription pills from the pharmacy for the last six months, from the looks of it.”

Sherlock jerks forward. His grip on the armrests keeps him from tumbling out of the seat – but his pulse is beating so hard out his ears he barely hears the scrape of his shoes against the tile. Irene, _here -_?

He turns his head to his side, and of course she is not.

There’s no one seated by him on either side, the nearest company being a couple and their toddler about eight chairs down the hallway to his left, talking quietly to each other. The staff continue to rush by him, undistracted. To them he probably looked like just another relative of a patient, nodding off while waiting for news.

He _is_ waiting for news, Sherlock thinks to himself. Has Irene escaped from Turkey yet? Has she arrived at her hideaway in Montenegro? She’s supposed to call him once she has.

How long is a journey from Istanbul to Tivat, anyway? He digs into his trouser pocket for his mobile to look it up online. An employee mumbles something through the outdated PA system, disturbing the hallway with a growl of electronic noise; he has to shut his eyes for a moment and block it out. It’s murky enough that he almost hears hints of Irene’s voice in it again, suggesting things around the hospital to look at.

Good god. A train from Istanbul to Thessaloniki is eight hours, and to get to Tivat from there she needs a bus that passes through Macedonia and Kosovo – a fifteen hour ride. Factoring in the potential waiting times between trips, she’d be traveling for nearly forty hours.

He won’t hear from her for the next two days.

The mobile nearly slips from Sherlock’s hand, but he wraps his fingers tighter around it. He remembers, suddenly, their last conversation. _It’s only a straight line from here to Tivat,_ he hears her tell him in a whisper. Putting that now against the facts, it’s painfully obvious that she meant to lie to him. Why – to spare his feelings? She’s clearly in deep danger. Why hide half the facts? Does she think him so fragile?

“You alright?”

Sherlock looks at his mobile. The screen has gone black. He blinks hard several times, then remembers someone had asked him a question.

He looks up to see John at the door to the delivery ward. His gray hair’s a little messed, like he’d pushed his hand through it several times, and there’s a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. His eyes are reddened and heavy. But, he’s smiling. It’s a tired, faint smile. But it’s real.

“What?” Sherlock says, and he’s puzzled to find his throat hurts from disuse.

John shakes his head. “I said, you alright?”

“I’m… fine,” he answers, and after a few awkward seconds, he clears his throat. “Did you forget something?”

“Forget somethi– it’s been three hours.”

“Three hours?” Sherlock says. “What are you talking about, you both went in there just a minute ago.”

John raises his eyebrows. “It felt like a minute out here?”

“Well – yes.” Sherlock frowns. “Didn’t it for you?”

John’s unkempt hair, bloodshot eyes, and twitching fingers seem to answer that question for him. “Get in here and meet your goddaughter, you sod.”

* * *

Inside the hospital room, Mary looks twice as tired as John does, but her grin is twice as big. Above her the cold light crowns her disheveled blonde hair with a gentle glow. But Sherlock can only gaze at her so long before his eyes are pulled to the bundle in her arms.

The infant is a small, wet, pink-cheeked thing in a swathe of blue towel. Her face is scrunched into a grimace, and every few seconds she lets out a gurgle of confusion. It’s probably not a pleasant experience, being born. Suddenly you’re cold and disoriented, there’s a blinding bright light overhead, and a dozen unfamiliar noises bombard your ears. Whenever Mary brushes her fingers gingerly against the child’s brow, though, she seems to calm down.

“Put up a real struggle, this one,” John says quietly, easing onto the stool next to Mary’s bed. “You’d think she’d’ve come out with boxing gloves on.”

“With parents like you two,” Sherlock says, “I’m disappointed she didn’t.”

“Negative three hours old, she was already fighting,” Mary chuckles, her tired eyes fixed exclusively, lovingly, on her baby. She slips a pinky finger into her tiny fist, which curls feebly around it. “World’s greatest baby, indeed.”

“A feat like that warrants getting named, if you ask me,” John says, “Not that ‘world’s greatest baby’ isn’t awfully catchy already.”

Sherlock waves a hand. “You both have all her life to think of the best possible name for her.”

“Mm, all her life,” Mary murmurs, still smiling down at her daughter. She looks up at him suddenly. “Sherlock, want to have a go at holding her?”

“No,” Sherlock and John say together, though Mary is already passing the baby over to her husband.

John hesitates, but leans forward. “You might as well get used to it now,” he says, making a sound of effort as he curves his arms protectively under his daughter. “It’s Godfather Duties 101.”

He turns to face Sherlock, whose posture has gone rigid and eyes gone slightly wide. To be fair, John doesn’t look all that confident about letting him hold his baby, either. Still, he steps forward. “Alright, copy me.”

Sherlock is stunned for a few more seconds, but once he regains feeling in his arms, he awkwardly bends them to mirror John’s, cradling an invisible child.

“On three, yeah?” John says nervously. “One, two - “

The two of them let out a breath as he passes his daughter to Sherlock. Her mewls of distress grow louder for a moment at the bumpy journey she’s had to take from her mother’s hold, but all Sherlock can think in that moment, as her warm weight transfers into his arms, is how incredibly light she is.

For a single, endless stretch of silence, all he can do is stare in awe at her - her eyes squeezed shut, her tiny mouth moving to make wordless, unhappy noises. She’s nearly buried in her thick bundle of blanket, and yet Sherlock finds so much about her to read. Three kilograms. Blonde hair, though barely visible. A quivering chin that’ll grow to resemble the shape of her father’s.

“Well?” John’s voice disturbs his daze, “How’s it feel?”

Sherlock breathes. “…It feels right.”

As his deep voice rumbles through his chest, the baby suddenly quiets her whining, and stills as if by command. The crease of discomfort leaves that little space between her brows, and she starts moving her pink fists in a slow, curious way, as if searching for him.

“Would you look at that…?” Mary says. She lets out a sound of delight. “She recognizes you, Sherlock. From all those times I sat in on your client meetings. She heard your voice so much those last few months.”

“That makes no sense,” Sherlock argues, though he’s still staring dumbly at the infant. At that second deep, warm vibration, her face relaxes even further, and her mouth drops open in what looks like awe.

“Bloody hell,” says John. “Looks like we’ll need you around on those midnight wake-ups.” Without warning, he lets out a burst of real, happy laughter. “Sherlock Holmes. Welcome to the Watson family.”

 _Family,_ Sherlock repeats the word in his head, distracted. He’s got his biological one, and now this. Without ever having intentionally worked towards it, the past several years have gotten him surrounded with people who love him, and whom he loves back. A bizarre situation for someone who’s always preferred to do things alone.

It says something, he thinks to himself as he absentmindedly starts patting his hand under his goddaughter, whose quiet breaths have slowed to something like sleep, about how easy it is to find family.

And what of Irene Adler?

The question cuts through his calm like a lightning bolt, though to his credit his body only tenses slightly. Yes, what about her? If it’s so easy to become surrounded by people who care about you, how has she ended up on the run from faceless terrorists, bound for a foreign country while fleeing another in the shadow of Eastern Europe? Does she have anyone she can reach out to in dangerous times like these? Is there anyone waiting for her in Montenegro? Is she really as he imagines her when she calls, and all he has to go on is her voice: isolated, constantly looking over her shoulder for enemy? Fending for herself, alone?

She doesn’t need anyone to worry about her, a part of his mind assures him. And… yes, that is true, he thinks as he forces his muscles to relax. She’s gotten this far, and made impressive progress. If anyone can deal with a spanner in the works like this one, it’s her.

So, yes. She doesn’t need anyone –  

\-  and she certainly doesn’t need _you._

“Oh _bugger!”_

Mary suddenly swears, at the same time as the loud clatter of a glass against a hospital food tray. She’d knocked over her water when she reached for it.

Caught off-guard by the sound, Sherlock flinches, which jerks the Watson baby out of her sleepy trance and, newly wide awake, she lets out a deafening wail of protest at the big, noisy world she’d been born into.


	6. Nadir

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kisses to all. :) Enjoy!

_Day One_

A quiet and beautiful morning stretches over the breadth of Tivat.

It’s a coastal town in the country’s smallest municipality, at the very edge of the Adriatic Sea. It might be the last point in Montenegro that the sunrise touches each day. In the seven o’clock chill, it certainly feels that way.

In her hideaway, Irene Adler curls tighter under the warmth of her thin blanket, under a slant of shadow the sunrise doesn’t reach.

She’d arrived just an hour ago, carrying in her bag a laptop, a mobile, a power bank, two changes of clothes, and a fistful of cash, to the place that, due to an inconvenient lack of other options, she has come to call home.

In the crowded business district, which is decidedly less attractive to the town’s tourists than the wide-open bay, is a stone-gray, 15-storey commercial office building, one of the area’s oldest and most outdated in design. Its proximity to the Tivat Health Centre means that most of its office spaces were once kept as clinics by doctors – dermatologists, physical therapists, dentists, the like. In the last few years, however, most of them have moved out, seeking larger offices and more modern facilities.

The only part of this building that remains absolutely silent and unoccupied, eerily enough, is the entirety of its thirteenth level. The famous story in town is that, when the structure was built decades ago, the head developer, after suddenly falling ill, was replaced by his passionately superstitious son who warned anyone interested in renting space against taking an office with such an unlucky number. It’ll poison their business, drain their funds. They say the hour that every unit in floors one to twelve, and fourteen to twenty, was reserved, he had slumped over at his dinner table and died.

As a gesture of respect, or maybe jest, the company has up to now kept all fifteen spaces on Floor Thirteen empty and unrented, and locked off the area entirely from the main stairwell.

It, however, remains accessible via the outdoor fire escape.

So it is in the grim yet cozy Unit 13E where Irene Adler comes to rest her feet, time and time again, whenever there is something to run from.

A narrow rectangle of space with minimal furniture: the secretary’s wooden reception desk, plus a rickety matching chair. The walls, once egg-white, now yellowed with age and layered with dust. There’s a door that leads into the main office space, but it’s shut too tight to try and budge open, and she’s never felt the need to have a go at picking the lock. The bathroom is through the door right beside it, thankfully not locked. There’s no electricity on her floor, so the outlets and light switches are useless, but at least the plumbing works.

There’s a single window that provides a decent view of the distant central plaza and a glimmer of the sea, but she avoids standing by it too much, lest a passerby look up and screech in horror at the shadowy apparition on the famously unoccupied thirteenth floor of Tivat’s old medical offices.

She’s tried brightening the place up the last few years with her own decorative additions – a stack of books in a corner of the room for a splash of color, and also to help her pass the hours while in hiding. Various souvenirs brought in from her travels all over the world, filling the desk drawers or covering the walls.

Right beneath the window is her narrow, foldable mattress: her latest addition, after deciding that lying every night on a ratty brown carpet that’s probably half as old as she is didn’t make an ideal home.

What a great decision, Irene thinks, as she sinks into the cushion of its flimsy stuffing, after thirty-four straight hours of travel. What a great, beautiful, _wonderful_ decision. Suddenly all the exhaustion she’d fought to compartmentalize while keeping alert on the chilly late-night train or the crowded Macedonia bus rushes forward to weigh every limb down like lead. Her injured leg throbs in irritation over her extended use.

She hadn’t slept those several hours traveling across countries, but she can’t sleep just yet. Dragging a hand down her face, Irene stretches to reach into her bag beside her and pull out her MI6 phone.

She scrolls past the name of her MI6 contact based in London. For a moment she lingers over the name of Fatma Ayek, wondering if her Turkish teammate has safely reached her own hideaway. She lingers longer over Lucien Palomer’s.

Finally, she finds the name she’s looking for at the bottom of the list, and taps it. She shifts onto her side while she brings the phone to her ear.

It’s not even halfway through the first ring when Sherlock picks up. “Where are you?”

Tired as she is, Irene raises her eyebrows, taken by surprise by how immediately he’d answered. It takes her another second to respond. “I’m in Tivat, I just arrived.” She licks her lips. “I’m safe.”

She hears a slow exhale on the other end, and then silence. After so openly showing his worry and then his relief, she suspects he’s shifting his tone into one of cool detachment. “Good,” he finally says.

Irene smiles. “I didn’t worry you too much, did I?”

“No matter what I say – no, I didn’t, I was confident you’d be able to protect yourself – yes, I did, I thought of you every minute and sobbed into my pillow – you’ll manage to take it as a compliment.”

“Fair enough… would those be your down pillows or your cotton ones?”

“Funny.”

She gives a soft laugh, and moves to lie on her back, feeling much more relaxed. “Well. Thank you. For caring enough to ask about where I am.” She grants him the mercy of not having to respond to that, by adding immediately, “Didn’t think I’d catch you awake. It’s six AM over there, isn’t it?”

“Middle of a case.” He sounds uncomfortable. “Couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to.”

“A new one? Do tell.”

“Are you serious?” Sherlock says, an edge of frustration to his voice. “Wouldn’t you rather rest? You’ve been on the run for two days.”

“Oh, indulge me, won’t you.” Irene stretches on top of her mattress. Above her, the light streaming in from the window brightens slowly and softly, so that she can indirectly watch the sunrise. “And I’m not on the run… I’m on vacation.”

* * *

_Day Two_

There is something bizarrely domestic about her current situation, Irene thinks. Or at least, what counts as domestic for a life like hers, as she stocks the secretary’s desk with canned food, energy bars, water bottles, whatever goods can fit in the narrow space of the drawers, while describing to Sherlock Holmes on her phone what the view out her single window is like.

“Boring,” he declares outright. Charming as always.

She shrugs as she pushes a drawer closed. “The view of the sea’s not enchanting, I’ll give you that. But I like being able to see the central plaza. The lights are nice to watch in the evening.”

“Is that all you do to pass the time?” Sherlock says dryly.

“Oh, no. I’ve an appointment to stare at the wall from nine to ten.” Irene presses the mobile between her ear and her shoulder as she claps the dust off her hands. “So. What have _you_ got planned for tonight?”

“Packing,” he drawls, almost grumbles. She grins silently at that. A task far too mundane for the great Sherlock Holmes! “I’ve finally got the time to make my trip to Luxembourg to visit the satellite operator in Betzdorf. I leave in two days.”

“Ah, to question them about the broadcasts,” Irene recalls. “That’s good. Is Doctor Watson coming along with you?”

“No, no. His wife’s just given birth to their daughter. They’re too busy slowly killing themselves ensuring that she survives her first week of life.”

“A _daughter?_ ” Irene repeats. She freezes briefly in her movements and remembers, oh, right, it really has been four years since she’s met the formidable pair of them. Of course John Watson would have gone and done as any typical man would and started a family. And Sherlock’s… well, kept being Sherlock. “My god. Have you met her?”

“Of course, I was there at the birth,” Sherlock says, sounding a little insulted, as if it were unthinkable that he _wouldn’t_ be there. “They’re overreacting, if you ask me. She came out a healthy weight and color, cried very little, no complications for mother nor infant – “ He stops suddenly. Irene raises an eyebrow. “…This is all unnecessary. I’m boring you.”

“Oh, no,” says Irene, moving away from the desk and towards her mattress. “Don’t worry, you’re not. I like listening to you talk about her.” She smiles. “You seem very fond.”

“I… yes,” Sherlock replies, as if having just come upon the realization himself. “In any case. The baptism is tomorrow, and they still haven’t come up with a name.”

“Why not Irene?”

He makes a garbled sound as if he’d tripped over a step while speaking. _“_ What,” he says, after recovering.

Irene laughs as she lowers herself to sit on her mattress. “Just returning the favor, seeing as Doctor Watson was generous enough to lend us his name for _our_ future child.”

She chuckles again at her own joke, though there’s only absolute silence on the other end.

* * *

“Terrence Waters seems to be the one they’ve appointed to cover the north of Istanbul,” says Lucien, back turned to Irene, the halo of his blond hair lit by the glow of his two monitors. “Very clean route, keeps to establishments at the edge of the city. They’re mapping the perimeter. Perhaps moving in a spiral.”

“Or just a circle,” she says, one hand on her hip, the other pointed at one of his screens, tracing the outline of Istanbul. “Circle” doesn’t quite describe it; Istanbul is shaped more like a ragged trapezoid, divided further by two straits stemming from the southern Sea of Marmara that taper off at the ends, like the tail of a fish. “The city center, Taksim Square, is too famous, too visible. They’d be found out if they tried to net any clients from the hotels there.”

“Where do you think that potentially places their Headquarters?” asks Fatma Ayek from Lucien’s couch, her legs dangling over the edge. “At the perimeter, too? Or outside of Istanbul altogether?”

“There could potentially be no physical Headquarters at all,” Lucien says, still not looking away from his monitors. “All their sales could be carried out in a space online, and we need only a certain key to access it.”

“So no need for any actual undercover legwork?” Irene asks good-humoredly, folding her arms. “What am I good for, then?”

The sound of Lucien Palomer’s kind laugh, but it’s distorted and electronic, as if coming from speakers rather than his mouth. “Mademoiselle Adler,” the voice says, though it’s begun to drown under the blare of a ringtone. He turns finally from his computer, but the glow from his screens is blinding, and she can’t make out anything of his face except for pitch black. A stream of bright blood drips down from the end of his chin. “You should hope to never find out.”

_Day Four_

Irene Adler abruptly opens her eyes to the ceiling of her Tivat hideaway, her MI6 phone going off next to her head. The images from her dream fade like a scrap of paper dissolving in water, until she can’t remember any of it at all. It’s bright, possibly mid-morning. She rubs her face as she reaches for the device and taps to accept the call. “Mm?”

“I’m outside the SES S.A. facility in Betzdorf, and apparently a show of ID isn’t enough; they’ve got to go and ring up all of Britain to confirm that a Sherlock Holmes exists, and that he looks like me,” an irritated voice informs her at a rapid-fire speed, above the gentle rush of air in what sounds like sprawling countryside, “Whatever. I’ve given them Mycroft’s contact details; whatever he tells them should be able to get me in.” He pauses. “Were you just asleep?”

“Yes, but it’s fine,” she yawns. “When did you arrive in Luxembourg?”

“About five hours ago,” Sherlock answers. “I didn’t head for SES immediately. Wanted to look into its area layout and security measures before making my way here. Just in case they end up not legally allowing me in.” She really hopes he’s saying all this out of earshot of the building’s guards. He hesitates. “How… are you?”

She raises her eyebrows at that, but humors him: “I’m fine.” She adjusted her position on the mattress. “Someone below me is moving out, I think. I’ve been hearing tables and chairs getting dragged out all morning.”

“I meant in general,” says Sherlock. “In… hiding.”

Irene’s first idea is to correct him again gently, that she’s “on vacation,” but she’s fairly sure he’s tired of that euphemism by now. “Fine too, I suppose… I’ve not been discovered yet, so I’d say I’m managing the ‘hiding’ aspect well enough.”

“Mm.” He’s not satisfied with that answer, but he won’t question her any further.

Irene pushes herself up to a sitting position. “When do you fly back to London?” she asks, but a whoosh of air signifies he’s pulled his own mobile from his ear; presumably one of the SES employees has called his attention. She hears the distant chatter of several voices, both Sherlock’s and people she doesn’t recognize.

“Aha,” he says, when he comes back to his phone, “Mycroft’s gotten me a VIP pass, and an interview with the head of operations. Knew his name would be good for something.” He gives a short laugh of triumph. “Anyway. The visit should last about an hour. I’ll call you afterwards with an update, if you want.”

Irene smiles. “Looking forward to it.”

He promptly ends the call, and Irene sets her mobile back down on the carpet, and looks around for something to distract her for the next hour.

Typically she might step out and walk around the business district, hiding in plain sight among Montenegrins and European tourists while admiring the view of the bay, but she doesn’t feel like making the journey up and down thirteen flights of stairs on the fire escape. None of the books in the pile she keeps by her bed entice her, either.

Well, she figures, as long as Sherlock is getting some work done, so should she. MI6 had instructed her not to touch the case while in hiding, and to wait for them to summon her back to Istanbul, but it wouldn’t hurt to look over the intel she’d already gathered, would it?

She leans over on her mattress to reach for her outdated laptop, which she hadn’t touched since arriving in Montenegro, let alone turned on. Already a faint layer of dust has collected on the top of it; she wipes it away with her hand as she rests the device on her lap, and pushes up the lid.

She should’ve remembered how she’d left her screen right before leaving Istanbul. Soon as the light blinks to life, Irene sees again the dozen windows with messages from Lucien Palomer’s handler, informing her of his death and urging her to flee the city, from Fatma, wishing her luck and safety as she prepares to escape herself, from MI6, their memo to her issued in an urgent, all-capitalized instruction to take as much evidence as possible, and as few of her own belongings, along with her. Irene is frozen for a few seconds, pulled back all too viscerally into the surge of panic she’d experienced upon receiving all this news at once, almost a week ago in an entirely different part of the continent.

Then, drawing in a breath, she maneuvers the cursor to close every single one of those windows. They’re of no use to her now. Gone are all the messaged reminders from a still-living Lucien, gone are Fatma’s words of encouragement, gone are MI6’s requests for updates that don’t even address her by name.

She moves to open the folder containing her photos of Terrence Waters’ mobile. They’re all dim and fairly blurry, seeing as she’d taken them with her own spycam while sitting on top of Waters’ unconscious body, trying to ignore the painful throb in her injured leg while waiting for Fatma to arrive, but the words are legible enough. She’d seen and studied all of them before, but maybe now, after four days of rest, she might see something new.

Her photos of his inbox only have the ends of his most recent conversations from the last two days before she and Fatma had apprehended him. None of the names of his contacts match up with the list of suspected aristocrats MI6 had given her long ago. So it’s either these really are only his friends, unaware of the data black market he ran with Shield and Browning… or they’re marks he was trying to recruit. That must be what all the invitations to drinks or dinner were about…

Irene flips to her photo of that single unsent message in Waters’ drafts folder. _2000 daire._ No progress there since the first time she’d come upon it. Lucien had died while researching on it. The way its image glows on her screen, murky but still readable, almost taunts her.

She squints. The recipient line is of course blank, but she’d never given the message’s timestamp a good look: _9:43 PM._

She glances at the timestamp of her own spycam’s shot of it: _9:58 PM_.

Terrence Waters had been about to send this to someone, right before he was distracted by Irene in the hotel bar, she realizes with a rush of adrenaline. But to whom? The last person he’d been chatting with in his inbox? Was it a new person he was luring into their data market?

Irene flips back to her photo of his last exchange before her team had captured him. It’s the tail end of his conversation with someone, where his last message is _There is no dusk or dawn on the clock of Istanbul._ Thanks to the darkness of the snapshot, and possibly the shakiness of her own hand, she can barely make out the name of the contact. God, who was it? She doesn’t have Sherlock Holmes’ eidetic memory, nor the phone itself in her possession.

But Fatma Ayek does. Or at least, she did, when they were all still stationed in Istanbul. Would she have shipped it back to England along with the captured Terrence Waters, for MI6 to look through themselves? Or would it still be in her keep, in case she could study it herself for additional clues? Irene looks at the MI6 mobile she’d set down on her pillow, and forces herself to turn back away.

She could call her and ask. Or she could stay put, and dutifully follow MI6’s instruction to keep her bloody hands off the case until they send her back to Turkey.

Her fingers twitch against the mattress. The longer she waits, the more likely it would be that Waters’ mobile is out of Fatma’s hands. Or the more likely that she’s dead, herself. Or who knows? Maybe Lucien Palomer was right, and the data sales are conducted entirely online, and both she and Fatma can infiltrate it from the safety of their hideaways out of Turkey. It’s not as if Margaret Shields and Peter Browning can send their henchmen out in two different directions, can they? It’d make them too visible.

Irene’s hand inches slowly closer to her mobile. Well, she tells herself, even if she does attempt to ring up Fatma Ayek, it doesn’t guarantee her teammate will answer. She might see Irene’s name on her screen and realize she’s disobeying direct orders, and ignore her call to ensure that neither of them get into trouble. If that’s the case, Irene thinks as her finger brush over the top of the device, what’s wrong with trying?

One heartbeat before she’s cemented her decision, the MI6 mobile lets out a deafening ring to signal an incoming call.

Irene flinches from the suddenness of it. But then she shakes her head, closes her laptop, and picks up the phone. “Yes?”

“Useless,” spits Sherlock, his tone heavy with irritation. “Well, not _useless_ useless.”

“What?” Irene is still recovering from the surprise.

“The people at SES,” he says, voice uneven, as if he’s trudging gruffly down a road. “They told me they’d combed the records of their satellite operations from now since the previous year, and they can’t find any successful hacks from within their facility, let alone any invasive coding that connects to the Moriarty broadcast. If someone hijacked their satellite to put that video on British screens, it wasn’t from within their walls.” He adds, grumbling, “They told me they’re still looking into it. They’re going to question their teleports in other parts of Europe, and they’ll let me know if they find anything out.”

Irene furrows her brows. “How long will that take?”

“Anywhere from two months to six,” Sherlock sulks. “But that’s fine. I’m patient.”

Irene absently watches the dust particles caught in the sunlight streaming from her window, while she smooths a hand over the closed lid of her laptop. “I wish I were more like you.”

* * *

_Day Six_

The next time Sherlock calls her, Irene is curled up in the secretary’s wobbly chair, nursing a cup of bad coffee from a convenience store a block down.

“Still on vacation?” he asks, and she’s astonished to hear an edge of humor to his voice.

She smiles. “Unfortunately yes.” He sounds calm today, so perhaps he’s been able to do his own snooping around behind SES S.A.’s back, and found some intel to his liking. She hears an oddly loud whip of wind around him. Maybe he’s on the tarmac of an airport, about to board his flight back to London?

“…You hadn’t called me yesterday,” Sherlock says. “I thought something had happened.”

The admission surprises her. But it _is_ true. “You needn’t worry, dear. Where I am, nothing happens.”

“Good.” Next she hears the swing of a heavy door behind him, shutting out the sound of the wind, which puzzles her. Was he the last one to board the plane? She hadn’t heard the roar of the engine. “Hopefully you’re not _too_ bored.”

Irene laughs as she stands up, leaving her coffee on the desk. “Maybe a little. I keep glancing out the window hoping the view turns into something new.”

“Has it?”

“No. Never does. Still, the sculpture in the central plaza is nice to look at.”

“Yes, an anchor, isn’t it? Bit on the nose for a coastal town, if you ask me. But the way the afternoon light hits it is beautiful.”

She’d never mentioned it was an anchor.

Irene freezes mid-stride.

She turns slowly towards the door, inch by inch, as if moving too fast might bring the room shattering down around her.

Sherlock says nothing on the phone, leaving only the sound of his still, quiet breathing, which is magnified somehow inside Irene’s head. Her eardrums might split from the volume of it, layered over her thundering pulse.

An invisible force shoves her forward, and she takes a wide, clumsy step towards the office door. She’d dropped her phone somewhere along the journey.

Hands that look like hers, but don’t feel like hers, undo the several locks on the door, until they reach the doorknob sitting at the bottom of them. She feels the last of her oxygen leave her lungs as she pulls it wide open.

There, standing in the hallway, clear as daylight in his scarf and coat, MI6 mobile held to his ear, is Sherlock Holmes.


	7. Eclipse

On a runway in the airfield of Heathrow Airport, London, a plane completing its journey from Luxembourg lands, one seat in coach reserved under the name of Sherlock Holmes. It is visibly empty to all passengers onboard.

In the coastal town of Tivat, Montenegro, Sherlock Holmes stands at the door of Irene Adler’s hideout in a semi-abandoned office building in the fading afternoon light. No one can see either of them but each other.

Slowly, Sherlock lowers his mobile from his ear. It somehow ends up back inside his coat pocket, but he can’t recall piloting his arm to slip it in there. In his other hand is the strap of his black duffel bag, which weighed five kilograms the last time he’d checked before leaving for the airport, but at the moment feels like nothing but air.

Irene is as still as the half-empty office behind her, save for the barely detectable tremor of the hand she keeps on the side of the door.

Sherlock can’t move, only look. She’s somehow the same and wildly different from his image of her whenever they spoke over the phone. Loose, softly wavy hair, instead of her pristine up-do. Not a midnight-black cocktail dress, but a plain white shirt and faded jeans, just about an inch too long. No towering stilettos, just her bare feet over worn carpet. The rosy color of her lips underneath the stark red that once coated them. And he hadn’t bothered to texture his mind’s copy of her face with faint lines and deepened circles under her eyes. People age, memories don’t.

The look on her face is, predictably, contorted in shock. Her mouth is slightly parted, and Sherlock dumbly finds himself drawn to the glint of white teeth just barely visible behind her lips. He wishes that he could say something, that three hours in the air and several more tracking her down in a bustling coastal town was sufficient time for him to find the right words for their first meeting in so many years, but there is nothing.

Maybe, he thinks, suddenly all too aware of the few feet between them, reaching forward for her wrist would just be enough.

He dismisses the thought and tries again, feebly, for words. “I – “

Without warning, both Irene’s hands shoot out and grab a savage hold of the lapels of his coat. She yanks him forward and off-balance, walking backward so that he stumbles gracelessly into the room. His face falls intensely close to hers, sending his pulse skyrocketing. With suddenly heavy breaths he drops his bag to the floor, and he starts to raise his hands to her waist so that he might rebalance himself.

Before he can even touch her, Irene wheels him aside and throws him behind her. His back hits the edge of a desk, and when he regains awareness, he stares, stunned, as she leans out into the hallway, urgently looking left then right, before pushing the door closed and doing up its four locks – three built in, one it seems that she’d crudely installed herself. For several seconds the only sounds are the clicking of metal and both their panting.

After securing the last lock at the top of the door, Irene keeps her back turned to Sherlock, though he can observe the slowing heave of her breaths in her shoulders, the tension in both her hands that she keeps pressed flat against the wood. He’s frozen to his spot himself, unable to reach forward or to look anywhere else but at her.

After what feels like an eternity, Irene turns halfway around, though she keeps one hand on the door. Her expression isn’t shocked anymore, but the wideness of her eyes and the quiver of her mouth still hold all of Sherlock’s attention.

Finally, she takes a slow, deep breath, and says, “What in god’s name are you doing here?”

Initially he’s distracted by the sound of her voice, now undistorted by electronic interference, deep and clear and real. But then he processes her question, and – it’s a good one. What _is_ he doing here?

There had been some kind of trance that fell upon him while standing before the immense Departures board of Luxembourg Findel Airport, absently clutching his duffel, searching the rows for the listing of his flight back to London two hours from then, despite the fact that he’d easily memorized the time, seat number, and gate long ago. Something invisible and heavy kept him from moving forward to the check-in counters, the feeling like he’d left something behind, or like a vast obstacle stood between him and returning home. His visit to SES S.A. had been fruitless, yes, but he’d flown greater distances for greater disappointments, and the tech team’s promise that they would report any new findings to him was at least some news he could bring back to Mycroft.

Then, suddenly, the screen before him had flashed the departure time and gate number for a flight to Tivat, Montenegro, an hour sooner than the one to London, and for some reason that was what propelled him forward.

It was three hours aboard a tiny plane, but it had felt like no distance at all.

He remembers to answer her. “…Felt like a side trip.”

“In the opposite direction of England?” Irene asks, sounding just as exasperated as she deserves to be. “How did you even find me?”

That one, at least, is easier to answer. “The… er.” He turns his head to look at something on the desk. He senses Irene following his direction and looking downwards too, at the coffee cup she’s left there.

A few seconds, and Irene lets out a sigh. “The convenience store. You followed me from there.”

“For a while,” Sherlock admits. “I stopped about a street away from here to keep from being too obvious, then used the description of the view out your window that you’d given me to figure out which building and what floor you were on.”

“Christ,” she says breathlessly, and turns away from him a moment to drag her hands down her face. “Jesus _Christ,_ Sherlock.”

It at least grants him some time to observe their surroundings. It’s a tiny room, built as a waiting area for the office owner’s clients. The lack of outlines of chairs and furniture against the white walls means it had never fulfilled its purpose. Two doors in the wall opposite the entrance: one into the loo, the other, he assumes, into the main office.

Everything else, he notices, comprises of Irene’s own additions to the space. Her small bag, kicked to the corner next to a pair of grungy sneakers, a pile of paperback books, a thin mattress and sheet beneath the only window in the room. Sitting on top of it is a worn-looking laptop. And the dozens of things pinned to the walls, presumably from her travels. Photographs from what seems to be ancestral albums of old-moneyed families, brochures from prestigious organizations, planes of fabric like scarves and handkerchiefs from colorful places – flat, malleable things she could fit into a small bag in a rush.

Something twists in his stomach to see the little Irene has to interact with while in hiding. No wonder she let him ramble on during their calls; it might’ve been one of her few sources of entertainment. Of company.

He’s distracted by the sound of a zipper being tugged open, and he turns to see Irene kneeling at his bag which he’d dropped earlier to the floor, head bent to inspect the contents. “What are you doing?”

“Turning off your mobile,” she answers, not turning to face him, “Your real one.” She fishes the iPhone out from the bag, though not without partially pulling up and rumpling some of the articles of clothing he’d tucked it under; he doesn’t appreciate that. “Can’t risk having a non-MI6 signal traced here.” He sees her hold down the Sleep button, and switch the screen off.

“You could’ve just asked me to do that.”

“What, the same way I asked you to come here?” Irene says flatly as she tosses the device back into the bag. She plants a hand to the floor and moves to a crouch to stand up, but he sees her shake when she tries to balance on the balls of her feet.

“Are you alright?” Sherlock says almost automatically, kneeling to her level as she sinks her full weight back to the floor. He’s sure she hates that he witnesses it.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she waves a sharp hand at him, though she still doesn’t meet his eyes. With a huff of effort she takes her legs out from under her, then yanks up the left cuff of her jeans. It reveals the pink, healing wound on the side of her calf, the one she’d gotten in her brawl with Terrence Waters. “Felt a twinge. That’s it.”

The sight of her injury, real and tangible, is unsettling. It’s certainly not just a surface wound, as she’d led him to believe. It’s shallow like she’d said, but some muscle tissue surely still would have been shredded from the impact. No wonder she’d sounded so out of breath when she called from the train station in Istanbul. Already Sherlock feels that part of his mind kick into high gear, using this new data to revise his visualization of that evening when she’d taken down her first target, the gun going off against this precise part of her leg, and the hours she spent tending to it while speaking with him on the phone. No, he doesn’t want to think of the past, of things he wasn’t there to prevent. He wants to think of now.

“Are you at least keeping it from getting infected?” he asks, raising a tentative hand as if offering his help, but not about to touch her unless she lets him.

Irene shrugs as she leans back on her palms. “As well as I can, with the moving around I’m doing.” Still, he reaches forward as if meaning to lift the cuff of her jeans again; Irene seems to notice and swats his hand away. “For god’s sake, you don’t need to look. Just… help me up.”

Sherlock can do nothing but obey. He gets back on his feet and takes Irene’s outstretched hand in his own, and pulls her up. There is so much he registers immediately: the shortness of her nails that dig into the fabric of his coat sleeve, the warmth of the blood rushing beneath her skin, though most blatant is the change in her weight since the last time they’d seen each other – the last time he’d carried her, unconscious, under a rapidly dimming desert sky.

He pushes the thought away when Irene is standing at her full height again, dusting off the front of her shirt and jeans. “You can lay your coat and scarf over the desk, if you want. Not like I’ve got a hat stand,” she says as casually as any hostess would say to a guest, brushing past him.

It _is_ a warm room, so Sherlock absently unknots his scarf as he looks around the office again. “This place is…”

“Interesting? Depressing?” Irene stands in his periphery, hands on her hips, a curve of shadow.

He meets her eyes. “…not what I expected.”

It might be a trick of the light, but her face seems to soften with humor. “One of my humbler homes, admittedly. Oh, don’t look so horrified. I only come here when I need to disappear completely.”

And isn’t that all the time, Sherlock thinks as he sets his coat down on the desk. “How often is that?”

She turns her head, as if remembering. Her lips curl inwards in thought. “I don’t know… eight, nine times.”

“In the span of how long?”

Irene doesn’t face him. She picks a brochure up from the floor that had fallen when she’d shut the door, and pins it back to the wall. “About four years.”

Four years. Shortly after they’d parted ways. Shortly after –

“Karachi,” the word escapes Sherlock like a gasp for air. “You came here from Karachi.”

* * *

Irene still doesn’t turn, but she’s sure he sees her hand waver against the rusted thumbtack she holds to the wall. She had thought to herself, of course he’d figure it out from that timeframe. It would’ve been an insult to lie to him.

Sherlock doesn’t say anything. She supposes he has nothing to add to that deduction: no clever observations, no smug commentary. In the corner of her vision he stands frozen to his spot, one hand on the desk, resting over his coat, the image of his tall figure in his tailored trousers and stark white shirt so vividly familiar. Your move, his stance tells her.

Finally Irene lets go and looks at him, calm. “After I left the bay, I ran into an Australian missionary group within the town. Got them to think I was one from another chapter and that my car had broken down in the desert, and I needed a ride back to my headquarters in the next city. They gave me money for the bus and a packed lunch for the journey. From there I found an Italian medical mission large enough that I could blend in as a custodian using the uniform you gave me. I traveled with them by boat til we reached the Emirates, where they were going to take a plane home. I was able to get into an airfield shuttle headed for a flight to Macedonia and steal someone’s boarding pass. I arrived here in Tivat three days later.”

All this time, Irene had watched Sherlock listen, quiet and still as a photograph. She stands at the end of the room by the window, the sunlight shining behind her so that her body casts a long line of shadow across his tall figure, partially darkening his face. If he feels any trace of anger at the moment, it’s unreadable to her from his body language. He continues to lean a hand against the desk.

“Impressive,” is all he responds several heartbeats later, and going by the volume and tone of his voice it might as well have come from some pre-rehearsed recording. “You didn’t need my help at all.”

“I didn’t do it to humiliate you.”

“I’m very sure you didn’t,” Sherlock replies, and she’s astonished at how composed he sounds. There is no fury contained in his calm, but she detects something like resignation. “If there’s anything we could confidently establish from the few times we’ve crossed paths, it’s that you’ve only ever done things for yourself.”

Something about that assertion injects an ache into Irene’s chest, but she could never deny that it’s true. She dares to step closer – her shadow over Sherlock shrinks.

“I meant what I said,” he says, eyes not leaving hers. “What you did on your own was impressive.”

“Thank you.” Irene nods. “Is that all you have to say?”

“All I have to say that matters.” His hand on his coat closes into a fist, picking up the garment from the desk. He turns to bend over and fix the things that have spilled out of his bag. “I should go.”

“So soon?”

He pulls the zip of his bag closed. “I’m sure we both agree it was dangerous of me to come here.”

“Then why come at all?” Irene prompts. Another step forward. “You never did answer me.”

“Like I said – I’ve told you everything that matters.” His words are short and sharp, like cuts into stone.

Irene strides across the room. She throws an arm across the door, and looks up into the suddenly disconcerted expression in Sherlock’s eyes.

“This doesn’t change anything. I’m still grateful for what you did for me, in Karachi. I didn’t lie when I said thank you.”

His brows furrow in frustration, and he opens his mouth as if to ask what she’s talking about – but then she sees it, the light shifts in his eyes, and he remembers. His face falls, like he’s mortified that she brought up that secret conversation in that godforsaken motel – and what followed – at all.

She remembers that early morning, second for second. There is nothing on this Earth that could make her forget. Their kiss, protected by darkness. That bed and the heat.

She presses on, “You’d already done so much. I left because I didn’t want to owe you any more than I already had.”

At first, Sherlock is still. But then, in her periphery, Irene sees his coat and bag slip slightly from his grasp, as if sinking to the floor. And it is when she sees Sherlock’s jaw work, tense and squared, that she realizes with a curdling dread that she’s said the wrong thing.

“ _Owe_ me,” he repeats, like the word is poison. “I wasn’t aware that you’d settled a debt.”

Irene takes her arm off the door and reaches it towards him. “What we did that night – “

Sherlock sharply turns away, as if her mention of it had burned him. He tosses his bag back to the floor and his coat back onto the desk, like he suddenly can’t bear any more weight. “Do you think I’m just that simple?” he asks.

She can see what’s happening in his head. He thinks he’s found the solution, the answer to his case, and he’s latching onto the thought even as it gathers alarming speed. “Sherlock – “

“Did you think I rescued you then because I wanted t– “ he can’t finish the thought; he looks humiliated, nauseated by it.

“No,” she says, her voice suddenly hard. “I never thought that. Because it would mean you’d have thought of me as a reward, and if that were the case, I _never_ would’ve – “ The idea irritates her so much she presses her fists to her temples, then wrenches them away with a grunt of anger.

“Then why did it happen,” Sherlock persists, advancing so closely that Irene has to take her own step back, “Why _let_ it happen, if not to humiliate or repay me? Why don’t you have an answer for what it is, but have an answer for everything it’s not?”

“Why don’t _you_ have an answer,” she fires back, “If you’re just as much at fault as I am?” He can’t deny that, she knows it confidently. He can’t deny that he reciprocated, that he’d communicated desire with his every touch, every word. She has her memory of it, real and indestructible, and it is the one piece of evidence he can never tamper with.

“I do have an answer,” Sherlock says.

Irene is stunned silent. At some point, her back had met the wall, and now she leans, nearly slumps against it, her eyes wide and fixed on his.

Sherlock doesn’t turn away, but she sees every minute shift of muscle in his face, the sinking in his throat as he swallows. His mind is working, stringing together the words of his next sentence with care.

Finally, he says, “I let it happen, because I thought we were saying goodbye.”

Irene does not feel the floor beneath her. She presses her palms against the wall, as if it might help keep her from falling through the air. Her lips feel cold, and she realizes belatedly that she’d sucked in a sharp inhale.

She’s seen the look on his face before. It had been dimmed by the evening, lit only by the glow from a dying fireplace, but it’s the same expression he had that night in Mycroft Holmes’ house, as he had punched in the passcode to her cameraphone. One that is honest, that is angry.

“I thought that we would never see each other again,” Sherlock continues. “And I had accepted it.”

Irene dares to release one hand from the wall, begin to tentatively reach towards him. “Sherlock…”

“Then,” the quiet vulnerability that was in his voice only seconds ago is gone, “Four years later, you’ve decided to make your grand return – you take my place in a suicide mission, you have me learn of it through my _brother_ – “

Irene picks up the faint sound of footsteps from the office directly above. “Someone’s going to hear – “

“What was I supposed to _think_ ,” Sherlock continues, oblivious, “How was I supposed to reconcile everything I’d accepted four years ago with whatever you’re trying to achieve now – “

He is intense and uninhibited, and Irene is reminded of this version of him that had manifested in that Karachi motel years ago. But she shakes the thought away. “Keep your voice down – “

“ – everything you’ve ever said to me in one meeting, you negate in the next – “

“Be quiet – “

“ – and why do you insist we continue to have these phone calls as if nothing had ever happened – “

“ – shut _up_ – “

“ – why have I never had a say in when this starts and when it _fucking_ ends – “

Irene’s hand flies to Sherlock’s mouth as she shoves him back against the wall. His eyes go wide with anger for a second, but then a new series of footsteps sounds out from the floor above them, and he seems to realize the cause of her panic.

Irene glares for a moment, before turning her head upwards to watch the yellowed ceiling, tracing the path of the phantom feet. They cross from one end of the room to the other, then stop to pull open a low drawer and rummage through its contents.

For a full minute, the two of them are utterly silent, listening. Irene faintly feels the warmth of Sherlock’s slow breaths into her palm, and the working of his chin, but she doesn’t let herself look at him. Her other hand presses against his bicep, pinning it to the wall. The stranger on the upper floor pushes some drawers closed, then walk the length of the room again, typical busy movement.

When she hears the heavy shut of the door, and the footsteps fading into the far end of the hallway, Irene slowly pulls her hands away and finally meets Sherlock’s eyes. He still leans his head back against the wall, and looks down at her with a calmer, though cold, face.

Irene curls and uncurls her fingers. “Stay.”

Sherlock doesn’t move. “What?”

“You could use the rest,” she puts on her most casual tone. “And I could use the company.” She’s certain the state of her hideout had already told him as much. Still, it’s difficult to admit it outright. But a setting aside of pride, she assumes, was what brought Sherlock Holmes all the way to her door in the first place, and the least she can do is reciprocate.

His expression stays guarded. “You don’t need me taking up your space.”

Irene nods. “And you don’t need me taking up your time.” She moves backwards so she can rest against the desk. “Why does need have to figure into it? Maybe we could just enjoy hiding from the world a little while.”

“Vacation,” he cautiously repeats the word she’d used for it before, and she smiles, but not too wide. “What would we even do?”

She shrugs. “We could do what we’ve done for the past several weeks. Talk.” A brief glance at the coat and bag he’d left lying on the carpet in the middle of their argument. “Clearly there’s a lot we have to sort out.”

She sees his eyes shift, and his mouth move as if he wants to say something. He’s considering what danger there is in spending a day or two here with her, she’s sure. It strikes her, out of the blue, just how small the office really is: his head is just a foot or so from the ceiling. Perspective, she realizes, is something she hasn’t been able to have all these days, all alone.

Irene moves her gaze down from the top of Sherlock’s head back to his eyes, and realizes he’s watching her with a crease between his brows. It makes her realize she’s been staring, and with an upwelling of mild embarrassment she turns away and walks towards the window.

She turns around and drops to sit on her mattress on the floor, leaning back against the wall and facing Sherlock again. All the while, he had watched her make the journey across the room. “Aren’t you tired from travelling?” she raises an eyebrow. “Come, sit.”

The man wavers in his spot, suddenly looking pale. It hits her a few seconds later – he’s wondering where she plans for him to sleep, what with a single, narrow mattress being the only thing resembling a bed in her shoebox of a home.

Never mind. It’s not important at the moment. She insistently pats the space beside her. “Sherlock, relax.”

He doesn’t seem to take that order, though he does relent and walk over so he can turn and sit on the mattress with her, though he settles several inches away. He bends his long legs at a taller, more acute angle than hers, and keep his arms folded awkwardly over his abdomen. It’s a surreal sight, but Irene finds herself instantly liking it.

Sherlock is silently scanning the room again, his head tilting slightly as he turns it left, right. His eyes land finally on Irene’s stack of books directly next to him. There are twelve of them, and they sit neatly in a single column up against the corner. “Have you read all of these?” he asks, and his tone is much softer, so different from the harshness of their fight only minutes ago.

“Yes,” she answers. Sherlock continues to look at the books. She wonders if he’s deducing which novels are her favorite or which are her most recent steals based on the number and severity of the white creases along the spine, the black gaps of air between the pages.

“You have Einstein’s _Relativity_ ,” he observes, barely above a murmur.

“Mm.” Irene shifts in her place. “How long would you like to stay?”

Sherlock faces forward again, staring at the other end of the room, and she traces the line of his profile with her eyes. He thinks for a moment. “As long as I’m welcome, I suppose.”

“Won’t Mycroft wonder about you?”

His upper lip twists in disdain. “He’ll always wonder about me.”

“How sad. You’re not _that_ elusive.”

To her surprise, Sherlock exhales an amused huff of air – and _smiles._ The ends of his mouth pull upwards, and the most unique lines appear along the muscles of his cheeks, and he closes his eyes for the briefest moment. She has never seen anything like it on the face of Sherlock Holmes, ever.

When he opens his eyes again, all trace of his brief smile completely gone, Irene dares to lean the slightest bit closer. “So. Friends again?”

That earns her an incredulous, somewhat dark sideways glance. “’Again’?”

She grins. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she says triumphantly, and leans back to face the end of the room, like him. The opposite wall is flat and plain and solid, only a few meters away from where they sit, but in the sudden, vast silence, Irene could almost feel as if they were both staring into infinite space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes:  
> 1) Their argument isn't over. (Clearly)  
> 2) There's no direct flight from Luxembourg to Tivat (I checked and there's always a stopover in Germany), but let's pretend there is. If the travel time were any longer I'm convinced that Sherlock would have decided to just take a nap or something.  
> 3) Sooo much trivia about this chapter! Haha! Here's an interesting one: this, and the chapter after it, were the only two chapters in this story I rewrote from the ground up after S4 aired. Both were supposed to go an entirely different direction. Who knows, maybe one day I'll post the "deleted scene" version of it after the fic is complete. Also: this, and the chapter after it, were the absolutely most difficult for me to write. And not for any dramatic reason. I just got stuck so many times, and I have no idea why.  
> 4) Feel free to cast the stranger on the fourteenth floor as any actor you'd like that you wished had done a cameo on Sherlock. At the moment I'm partial to Idris Elba.  
> 5) I like it down here! Maybe I'll stick my author's notes at the end of the fic from now on. LOL.
> 
> I thank everyone again for all your comments and kudos :) I wish everyone a great May!


	8. Equal and Opposite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mature content ahead.
> 
> Gosh, I was so sure I had more to say than that! Thank you for your continued reading/commenting, and enjoy.

“Irene.”

A light hand on her arm, and Irene blinks awake with an inexplicably sore neck. She opens her eyes to a tilted view of the opposite end of the room and brings her head upright. “Mm?”

“Irene,” a voice beside her says again. She looks up to her right to see Sherlock, no longer sitting with his back against the wall like her, but on his knees facing the window, a hand at the glass, as if he’d been peering out of it a moment ago.

His eyes are on her and his hand hovers tentatively over her shoulder, and he looks uncomfortable, as if something had happened without her knowing. Irene feels a residual warmth on the side of her head, some strands of her hair clinging to the faint sweat at her temple, like she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder. Had he moved away to escape that?

“There are cars out front and a group of people,” Sherlock says, which helps shake her out of her grogginess. She drags a hand down her face, then turns around into a kneeling position so she can join him at the window. The daylight has dimmed, though she still has to blink to get a clear view of the street in front of the building, thirteen floors below.

He’s right – there are four shiny, modern-looking cars parked and waiting on the road; a team of smartly dressed men and women, some exiting the building, others already entering the cars, look to be chatting and shaking hands at the entrance. From their angle she can only see the tops of their heads and the grey of their suits, but she recognizes the front-most sedan, a black BMW, immediately.

“It’s the head of the development company that owns this building,” she says. “But I don’t know where those other cars are from. Perhaps he’s selling the property to a new company. It only makes sense; nearly everyone’s moved out to newer offices.”

She’s still looking down at the ant-sized people, but she senses Sherlock turn his head to look at her. “I imagine they’ll want to rent out this floor.”

“I imagine they will,” she replies, then with a grunt of effort she pushes herself upwards and away from the window. “It seems I’m about to become homeless.”

“You don’t sound too devastated about it,” he remarks behind her.

“Not exactly my dream location,” Irene says as she steps into her sneakers. “Plus I’ve been here for four years. It’s a good time for a change.” She goes up to the front of her door and begins to undo the locks.

“What are you doing?” The minor raising of his voice gives her a little pleasure; it’s been a while since she’s unsettled someone.

“It’s the end of an era. I want to celebrate,” Irene replies as she pulls the door open. She looks back over to Sherlock, who’s still kneeling on her mattress, body turned towards the window. “It’s just about time for sunset, and I like to watch it from the rooftop. Are you coming?”

He doesn’t move. “Other people go on the rooftop.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” she says brightly. “Office workers, who will think we’re also office workers. As long as they don’t know we live on the thirteenth floor it’ll be fine. Come on.”

He remains a moment longer at the window, she suspects out of defiance, then gets to his feet.

The outside hallway is cold and dusty, and their journey through it silent, but when Irene pushes the metal door of the fire escape open a rush of wind roars inward like in a tunnel. Without her jacket she remembers just how cold it is outdoors. She hugs herself as she steps out onto the black steel balcony, peering down at the zigzag of steps leading to the concrete. “You took these stairs up to this floor, too?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says behind her, “Not that you have any choice, but I can see why you don’t mind using them.”

They’re on the west face of the building. Unlike Irene’s hideout there’s no view of the glittering bay nor the central plaza, but in consolation they have a sprawling expanse of forest that curves over the side of the mountain range, and of course, the low, orange sun just about to set. They climb up the last two flights to the wide-open rooftop, where they fortunately have no company save for the door to the interior stairwell.

Irene lets out a sigh as she rests her elbows on the concrete ledge, looking out towards the west. “It’s funny when I think about how much I’ll miss this view. You can see the sunset from anywhere in the world.”

“Not from the Arctic Circle,” Sherlock says. He comes up by her side and leans forward, too. “What even made you like it here in the first place? That room on that floor, I mean.”

“Mm, I don’t know,” Irene says. “Perhaps I like that it exists in spite of all logic. Like me.” She shifts and immediately plunges her hand into Sherlock’s nearest trouser pocket. He turns to look at her with annoyance, but otherwise doesn’t move away.

A moment later, smiling, she pulls out a battered pack of Marlboros. “That’s my boy.”

She picks out a stick and places it between her lips, then looks up at him, blinking expectantly. Sherlock scowls, but moves to bring out a lighter from his other pocket (because of course). He raises it between them, but not before plucking the box from Irene’s fingers and taking out his own cigarette.

Irene wonders, for a strangely drawn-out few seconds, if he means to light their cigarettes simultaneously with a single flame. He doesn’t; he moves the lighter to hers first, puts his cupped hand inches from her face to shield the fire from the wind. Then he pulls back to tend to his own. Irene wonders if he senses her watching him as he covers the light, his cheeks hollowing slightly as a faint curl of smoke rises from behind his hand.

She draws in her own luxurious inhale when Sherlock hides the lighter away and turns back to look at her, holding his cigarette between two fingers. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he says.

“Social smoker,” she replies, reaching to remove her own from her lips. “I only do it when I’m with someone else.” Her eyes slide to meet his as she blows out her smoke, and she doesn’t break their gaze. “And, well. You’re someone else, aren’t you?”

Something shifts subtly in Sherlock’s expression, but he doesn’t reply. Irene turns back to the view. The sun is sinking behind the distant mountain now, casting a veil of gold over the forest and the face of the building. This, along with the hazy menthol in the air and her lungs, makes her feel as if she’s swimming in a dream. She forgets for a moment where she is.

She absently twirls her cigarette between her fingers. The orange flame at the end of it is like a miniature sun in itself, a glowing, dying light born from an eruption of energy. Both are capable of burning her if she should ever dare to touch the surface.

For some reason Irene feels the impulse to turn to Sherlock and tell him all these inane things. Perhaps it’s from those damned phone calls, which she’d originally proposed in order to pacify him and to keep them both entertained for a good few months. Instead it’s come to designate him as the one person she has that she can share any of her thoughts with, whether they connect to her mission or not.

She wonders if it’s the effect of the phone calls, too, that she wants to tell him that she’s glad he’s here.

When Irene looks at Sherlock, though, his gaze is fixed not on the sunset; his head is tipped way back so that he stares directly upward at the patch of sky that’s already faded into dark blue night. His lips are slightly parted, and she watches him absentmindedly exhale a cloud of smoke up towards the scatter of stars.

“Still thinking about the satellites?” she asks. Tall as he is, she still has a view of a sliver of his face, and she can see him blink a few times as if he’d been woken up. He tilts his head forward to take a seemingly much-needed a drag from his cigarette, and then turns towards her, face serious.

“I shouldn’t be,” he admits. “There’s nothing I can do but wait for news from SES. Dwelling on information that you can’t act on is a waste of time.”

Her thoughts flicker briefly to her photos of Waters’ phone, and how tempted she’d been the other day to disobey direct orders and call Fatma Ayek. “You’re patient. You said so yourself.”

His jaw works for a moment, and then he looks down at his cigarette and lets out a sigh. “Do you believe that? Even when I’m standing here with you now?”

Irene keeps her eyes fixed on Sherlock. “You never did answer me when I asked why you were here.”

She watches him for a while, as he stares towards the sunset. He swallows then takes another puff from his cigarette, for courage, she surmises. The smoke that rises out from his mouth curls against the shape of his upper lip.

“You were right,” he says after a stretch of silence, “You don’t need me. And I don’t need you. Hours ago in the airport in Luxembourg I made the mistake of assuming otherwise.” He turns his head to look at her directly now, though from behind the barricade of his shoulder. “I tried to leave you earlier because I saw that you were doing just fine on your own. By imposing myself I wasn’t giving you support, just a burden.”

Irene frowns. “You’re not a burden, I’ve already told you as much.”

“It was still wrong of me to come here.” He shakes his head. “I should’ve had every faith that you would complete this assignment eventually and return to England where we could have safely met again. You’d think that after four years I would’ve been able to wait a little longer. Instead here I am – “ he makes an exasperated jerk of his wrist towards the view, and a sprinkle of ash falls from the end of his cigarette, “ – watching a sunset that could’ve been seen from London just a few hours from now.”

In the golden light he looks like an illusion. Or maybe a sculpture. Irene has to tear her eyes away and focus instead on the little sliver of sun still left peeking out above the shadowed mountainside. She’s suddenly lost all desire to finish her cigarette.

“Well, don’t feel so special,” she says softly, with forced lightness. “I’ve had to learn how to be patient, too.”

She senses him train his eyes on her. “What?”

“It hasn’t been four years since I’ve last seen you.”

Sherlock is silent.

“When you – “ she suddenly has to clear her throat. “When you had faked your death. Well, I didn’t yet know you had. I saw you. A year ago in America.”

In the corner of her eye Irene can see that Sherlock is completely still. She remembers learning of his “suicide” from an American newspaper. That lonely, long night spent curled on her couch, cold and numb, but not crying. She goes on, “It was in Chicago. I saw you walk into a bank. Your hair was short and you were dressed as a security guard, but I knew it was you. That was how I learned you were still alive.”

She twists her cigarette between her fingers again. The light at the end of it is smoldering, dying. She turns it downwards and extinguishes it against the concrete ledge. “I considered – very seriously – following you. But it occurred to me you were keeping your survival secret for a reason. It was unbearable to know you were alive and not reach out, but that’s what I had to do. I had to be patient. So I ended up focusing my energy on something else – finding a way to get back into England.”

Irene sort of wants to laugh. She really _is_ competitive: she has to beat him when it comes to confessions, too. Or maybe she’s just accumulated far too many secrets in the span of her short life. She moves to take a drag from her cigarette – right, right, she’d stubbed it out. Now she has nothing to do with her hands but lay them open and flat. “So. Now you know. That’s how I– “

“Why didn’t you reach out to me?” Irene hears Sherlock say. He sounds irritated, and she turns to look at him, incredulous. He looks directly back, his entire face tense.

“What are you talking about,” she says, brows furrowing, “You were faking your death, why would I?”

“For my friends back home.” He stubs out his own cigarette on the ledge, though it seems to be more out of anger. “I’d faked it to protect them, not you.”

“Christ, how was I supposed to know any of that?”

“Oh, well, had we gone by my plan in Karachi, and you stayed with me until we got to the bay, we wouldn’t have lost contact with each other and I easily would’ve been able to inform you. Incredible what happens when you follow some simple bloody instructions, no?”

“Fine,” Irene snaps, turning her body to face him, though her hands still grip the edge. “So my silence in Chicago was my penance for abandoning you in Karachi. Let’s leave it at that and not stoop to something as pedestrian as apologies.”

“I don’t want your penance,” Sherlock growls, and he pulls his body away from the ledge too. His face hovers menacingly over hers, “nor your apologies.”

“Then _what do you want from me?_ ” Her hands spring from the ledge and seize fistfuls of his shirt. Sherlock jerks back, eyes wide in surprise, and his fingers fly to grab her by the wrists, but he doesn’t shove her away.

There had been something rankling beneath Irene’s skin since the moment Sherlock had shown up at her door, something sour and restless. She had pushed it aside in favor of calming him down and keeping them both safe. But here, on a wide open rooftop, she can let it out, and also see it for what it is under what daylight remains: anger.

“What is there for me to give you?” she says, face merely inches from his as she shakes him by her grasp on his shirt, “When you’ve chosen to come to me in the precise moment that I have nothing?” It feels like release, like an eruption of energy, only every word she launches at him adds to her rage rather than takes away from it. It’s enough that she has to dig her nails into his chest in utter frustration.

He gasps from the stabbing pain. “I want –“ he tightens his grip on her wrists, shaken out of his shock sooner than she expected, “I want you to _stop hiding from me.”_

Irene stares up at him in bewilderment. Her hands loosen against his shirt. Sherlock uncurls his fingers from her wrists and, it appears, puts on a façade of coldly, formally waiting for her response. But he’s betrayed by the tension she feels beneath her palms.

She searches his eyes for a sign, any sign, that he knows the immensity of what he’s asking. Not only for her, but for him. Her hands slowly return to her sides. In the fading sunlight, half his face is thrown sharply into shadow and Irene is reminded, with a dark thrill, of the single, long, unbroken gaze they’d shared on that bed in that dim Karachi motel room, when she had towered over him rather than he over her.

“…Fine,” she finally says.

Before he can answer to that, however, she grabs his wrist, not to take his pulse, but to her dig her thumbnail hard next to the major artery – his eyes widen and he gasps, nearly stumbling a step back, but unable to move away.

“But only,” she says, “if you stop hiding from _me.”_

Sherlock’s lips part at that. His expression is still furious, hostile, but now it fades away partly to reveal awe. What’s absolutely sure is that he doesn’t tear his eyes away from hers. Not for one second.

She sinks her nail harder, and in spite of the barrier of his suit jacket’s sleeve he hisses in pain. She leans closer. “I had what you didn’t, and vice versa,” she continues. She’d had the freedom and danger he craves, and he had the identity, the technology, the sanctuary she’s toiling towards. “But now we’re in a place where we’ve access to neither. Perfect balance.”

Her fingers at his wrist suddenly hunger to feel more of him. She wraps and slides her hand, hard, up the length of his forearm. He draws a sharp breath but doesn’t break eye contact.

“It only stands to reason that,” she says, and she’s mad at herself for being breathless, “To maintain balance, you give me as much as you take.”

“Irene,” Sherlock finally speaks, and his voice is broken, gravelly, _weak,_ and it’s like liquid lightning in her veins. With her hand now at his elbow, he reaches to grip her forearm, too – they are locked together, and they will fall through the atmosphere together.

“The only question now,” Irene presses, and they are so close now her chest is just nearly grazing his front and it feels as if they’re sharing oxygen, coated heavily with nicotine and menthol, “is if you’re willing to see who you are when you aren’t hiding.” She breathes in deep. “And if you’re willing to see _me._ ”

Suddenly he shuts his eyes and turns his head sharply to the side, as if she were the sun and he was unable to look at her any longer lest he go blind. No, that won’t do, Irene thinks with a flash of anger. She reaches up to take his chin in her hand and jerks his face back towards her hard, so that he can only look at her again, incapable of hiding any thoughts that flicker across his expression. Her thumb is curled just under his faintly trembling bottom lip, and she resists the urge to stretch it upwards and press it into his mouth. She wants him to say it, even now when everything about him is broadcasting it. She has to hear him say that he wants her.

“Careful with the question you’re about to ask, Mr. Holmes,” she says. “It has no set answer.”

“Show me,” Sherlock says. His eyes are wide and blown nearly black, and Irene will forever curse the way her knees nearly go weak, so that his hand, tight at her arm, is the only thing holding her up. He lowers his voice to nothing more than a whisper, a desperate secret that only she will hear, “show me.”

* * *

The sun is gone completely now. Sherlock stands with Irene in the almost-darkness, so that he sees nothing but her, feels nothing but her fingers digging into his suit jacket, smells nothing but her skin and the icy menthol in her breath. His face and limbs are burning hot. His heart is pounding so hard he feels it in his throat.

He’s asked his question. Shown his hand in the privacy of a city where no one knows their names. Now all he can do is pray she demonstrates some mercy and makes the next move. Whatever she’s got planned is certainly more well-designed than his current mental image of holding her against the ledge of the building, dropping to his knees and roaming his mouth over the landscape of her body, which he hasn’t felt against his in four years.

A rustle of noise to their side – they both turn their heads to detect that it had come from the door to the indoor stairwell. Someone is trying to open it.

Sherlock is caught off-guard when he feels Irene drag her hand down from his bicep to entwine her fingers tightly with his. “Come on,” she says, and he wonders with a rush of heat to his face if the risk of running into strangers is really what’s making her hurry.

They flee down the steps of the outdoor fire escape, feet moving fast enough that there’s nearly no sound as they land against the steel.

The warmth from her grasp, the sight of her form, small but swiftly moving down the steps, the moonlight on her skin, is too much. When they reach the balcony of the door into the thirteenth floor, whatever patience he was proud to have possessed is completely gone.

He turns Irene round and presses her against the heavy metal door and pulls her into a hard kiss.

It feels as if time is folding in half like a sheet of paper, and this present moment is suddenly one and the same as their stolen kiss in the desert four long years ago, and yet entirely opposite. The same heavy desire, but a new understanding of it. The same fear, but a new control over it. The same Irene. Thank god, the same Irene.

She makes a sound of defiance, but she opens her mouth under his, and a heady rush of heat and long-repressed memory floods him at the way she flicks her tongue under his teeth and then traces it over the swell of his upper lip like smoke. He pins her wrists against the door at either side of her head as he crushes against her, and she wedges her thigh between both of his so that they feel every inch of each other from chest to toe.

The faint sound of voices comes from two stories above them, and Irene pulls away with a gasp as if in alarm. Sherlock can only catch a glimpse of her wet and swollen lips before he turns his own head up, straining to see through the black grating. He tries to quiet his breaths to better hear the strangers, but he’s partly distracted by the sound of Irene’s own dazzling panting, and the tight heave of her chest against his.

The voices of two men, speaking to each other in casual Montenegrin. Two actual office workers, presumably taking their own smoke break before heading home. Unlikely that they’ll take the fire escape stairs to go down. They’ll most probably go back the same way they came, via the indoor stairwell, Sherlock thinks with minor, though unfocused, relief.

Irene apparently has the same thought, because she’s wrestled one wrist free of his grasp to fumble for the door handle. They stumble as one back into the thirteenth floor, and from there Irene wraps her hand more firmly around his and tugs him down to the end of the hallway where the door into her hideout awaits. There is no thought in Sherlock’s head but to follow. Every step forward he takes makes his limbs feel heavy as lead.

The second they’re inside her room, Sherlock’s feet propel him forward, but he feels Irene’s hand leave his. He turns around to see that she’s hastily doing the several locks on her door back up. Her hair is messy and tossed over one side of her shoulder, so that a sliver of the back of her pale neck is visible to him. It occurs to him in the fog of his want that it’s a part of her he’s never been able to touch. He goes, feet heavy over the carpet, and bends downward to press his lips to the flat of skin.

Irene’s head dips forward and she lets out a sound so familiar he has to press a palm up against the door and the other on her hip so he can lean the rest of his body into hers, opening his mouth, his tongue sweeping over the perspiration on her neck. She’s warm, tilting back into him, and when he stretches up to bury his lips in her hair he sees her fingers shake against the last lock of the door. When she finally finishes securing it, Sherlock pulls her away and turns them around, immediately pushing her up to sit on the desk, where his coat still lays.

Irene throws her arms around Sherlock the same time he wraps his own tightly around her, her thighs lifting to press against his sides. The last of their guards seem to fall away as they dissolve into frantic, broken kisses that tear away to latch wetly to each other’s jaws, necks, their hands diving into each other’s hair and under each other’s clothes. Somehow in the haze of their gasps and whines Sherlock manages to pry the back clasp of her bra undone beneath her shirt, while she’s managed to push his suit jacket entirely off him even when he doesn’t vividly recall ever taking his hands from her skin.

He manages to stop rocking against her long enough to lean away so he can help her pull her white shirt over her head and then her bra. Inwardly he’s yearning to shed more layers of clothing, too, now that his body temperature’s reaching almost feverish heights, and his trousers have grown tight and uncomfortable. He bends forward to wrap his lips over one of her bare breasts, but without warning Irene takes a hold of his shoulders and shoves him away till arm’s length.

She leans farther backward, panting as she stares up at him, her glowing face framed by black, disheveled hair, and Sherlock feels held in place by more than just her hands.

“Are you _observing,_ ” Irene asks, low-lidded, and her voice is husky, painted with heavy breath. She can’t quite conceal its tremor. Her fingers tighten roughly on his shoulders, and even with the barrier of his shirt the sensation shoots straight to his cock.

He knows what she means. Still, he needs to quickly close his eyes and let out a shaky exhale, else he might disintegrate. He opens them again. “Yes.”

Irene is drinking in the sight of him, what he suspects is his equally mussed hair, his reddened lips. Barely dressed as she is, topless though still in jeans, every inch of her is Irene Adler. “Show me that you are.”

Sherlock feels a pressure at his shoulders, and he realizes she’s guiding him downwards. Her physical strength is ordinary but she makes up for it with the tension of her grip, and of course her dark gaze. Her nails dig into his shoulder blades like needles. He swallows down the heavy, almost suffocating lump in his throat and, eyes not once leaving hers, he sinks achingly to his knees before her.

As soon as he’s kneeling fully into the carpet, he squeezes his eyes shut and presses a flushed cheek to her still-clothed thigh, and she combs a soothing hand through his hair, a sharp (and he suspects, deliberate) contrast to the almost painful force of her downward push. His hands reach up and curl into the waistline of her jeans, and begin to work them off her body. She lifts her hips to assist, until the worn denim has slid all the way down her legs, taking her sneakers with them.

Sherlock gathers the shoes and fabric into a ball that he hastily tosses aside, then looks back up to her, eyes wide, hands trembling at her knees. Irene gazes right back, and even as she’s seated upon an old wooden desk, bare and breathing hard, he sees her as a juxtaposition of all the versions of Irene Adler he’s ever had the misfortune and pleasure of encountering: sparkling and menacing in her Belgravia home, lit by firelight in 221B, dark and fleeting in the Karachi motel. And he wants every single one of them. He wants her. He won’t hide it any longer.

He dips forward and pushes his mouth between her legs. Immediately he hears her sigh raggedly, and feels her leaning backward to rest on her palms. She’s wet, and warm, and he cautiously presses the flat of his tongue against her entrance, then drags it up over her clit. He feels her tense up under his hands. He licks again, and her thighs jolt as if shocked by lightning.

With a shudder he buries his face deeper, wanting to lose himself in her heavy taste and the silkiness of her skin. His fingers sink into her thighs, trying in vain to hold her still as she spasms against his mouth. Every moan she lets out is like a caress, even as his own body throbs with impatience.

He starts to move his tongue in spirals against her clit – she gasps _“that,”_ and begins to pant so fast he forgets what the room around him looks like.

Irene’s fingers grasp a bunch of his hair into a fist and he grunts in desperation against her. The vibration from it and the sudden jerk of his head seem to be enough to send her careening into orgasm. Her heels dig hard into his back, and he holds his lips firmly to her as she twitches helplessly above him for several seconds. He continues to swirl his tongue over her until she lets out a last, shuddering breath – then her hand in his hair tightens and draws him back up to standing height.

Sherlock is almost scared his legs are too weak now to support him, but meeting Irene’s desire-flooded eyes, seeing her pink mouth and the layer of sweat over her cheekbones, is suddenly enough. He goes forward to kiss her hard again, moaning as she presses her hands at his lower back so that their hips meet and surge together, his now painfully obvious erection finally finding friction. It occurs to him vaguely that it’s not a certainly dignified image, still clothed though bucking between her legs in search of relief for his need, his hands tight at the edge of the tabletop, but he couldn’t give a damn about dignity.

With a huffed breath Irene finally reaches to unbutton his shirt and yank it hastily off him, and evidently with no interest anymore in waiting, she goes directly to working off his trousers, too. His hands clash gracelessly with hers as they undo the clasp, then the zip, and then pull it along with his boxers down his legs until he can step out of them and kick off his shoes.

He’s breathing so hard he feels dizzy, and he feels sweat dripping profusely down his temples, and Irene’s tiny mattress feels like it’s miles away instead of at the opposite end of the room. But it doesn’t even seem to be on her mind at all – she grabs him by his triceps and pulls him to climb onto the desk with her, pushing off his coat to the floor as they go. They turn a full ninety degrees so that they lie along the length of the smooth surface rather than across it.

Hovering over her and between her legs, his hands supporting him on either side of her head, Sherlock stares down in wonder at Irene’s blushed face, framed by her fanned out curtain of hair, her expression blissed yet still utterly alert. She reaches downward and wraps her fingers around his cock, hard and curved between their stomachs, and starts to pump him with enough force that his eyes fly closed and he lets out a long, rough groan. His hips move into the contact without his permission. It’s a sensation he’d felt with her long ago, that he’d drowsily tried in vain to recreate on those rare, secret nights where he’d wake up in his bed overcome with dreams of a dark, hot motel room in the desert, but having it again, now, he knows it can only ever feel this intense with her.

Sherlock can’t wait any longer. He wraps his fingers over her wrist; she seems to understand and brings her hand around to hold his hip and steady him, instead. Then suddenly he stills, unable to move forward.

Irene lifts her other hand and rests it on his cheek. “I’m here,” she says.

It doesn’t really mean anything. But it digs into Sherlock’s chest and pierces his heart, simply because it’s true. It rarely ever is.

“Yes,” he says again, breathlessly. Irene’s hand falls away and lands next to her face. He sighs and, sinking downward, he drives into her, the world around them going silent.

Irene arches into him with a whine, grabbing a hold of his shoulders. He only freezes for a moment, jaw still and tense, lost in the heat of her, in the way she wraps around him, before falling into a rapid speed, his chest rubbing roughly against hers.

He pushes deeper into her, enough that he gives a harsh cry – suddenly Irene’s palm clamps over his mouth again, and he has to distractedly remind himself that there might still be people in the floors above and below them. They can bugger off for all he cares, he thinks, and as her hand pulls back he drops his head to crush his lips to hers. His arms and thighs ache from the pleasure. _Oh, god,_ he feels like he might shatter into pieces.

The desk creaks faintly beneath them. Its surface is hard, supplying no cushion for his knees to dig into, so Sherlock relies on the support of his forearms and the force of his hips to keep up the pace of his thrusts, though Irene assists by planting the soles of her feet firmly against the wood to raise her pelvis up to his. She scratches her nails hard down the slick skin of his back, till she reaches his waist, where she wraps her arms tight to hold him closer.

After Karachi, he had thought he would never feel this, experience this, again. He thought Irene Adler was gone forever, and with her, along with so many other things, his single taste of a world he’d never once possessed an inkling of interest in beyond the occasional, fleeting urges any physical body might have.

But here she is again, real, present – with effort he pulls away from their kiss so he can look into her eyes again and confirm it.

The universe had had to fold in on itself for them to cross paths again, putting a dead man on a screen and a dead woman on a suicide mission. They had both had to give up pride in exchange for company – she drags her palms over his chest. Time will tell if such a bargain is worth it. But for now – he reaches down to press his fingers against her clit, and watches her mouth drop open in pleasure – he believes he is reaping the rewards.

“I – “ Irene starts, but then she tilts her head back so her neck stretches into view, though now Sherlock’s vision has gone unfocused. He’s buried deep between her thighs, his skin slippery against hers as needy sounds spill from their lips. Whatever she had meant to say is replaced by a broken moan.

His hands wrap around her legs again as he pushes himself repeatedly into her, and he feels it: her muscles pulsing overwhelmingly around him, her torso and shoulders arching from a shockwave of force. He can’t think of anything but her, feel anything but her heat and her tremors that seem to last an eternity.

With a whimper that he muffles against the side of her neck, Sherlock’s fingers tighten into her skin and he lets himself pound into her with abandon, but it’s not until Irene sinks her nails painfully into the tops of his thighs does he reach his breaking point. He comes hard, pressing her hips into the desk, his mouth tense and open in a silent cry. In the darkness behind his eyelids he sees stars.

When he finally slumps, drained and panting, against Irene, she brings her arms back up to wrap around his back, her breaths fast though soft in his ear, drowning out even the sound of his racing heartbeat.

The room around them is thick with heat from their activity, but thrown into night, barely anything is visible now save for what is caught in the path of the moonlight. But it doesn’t matter – nothing matters, especially not as Sherlock turns his face to Irene the same moment she turns hers, and they find each other’s lips in the darkness. That is all that needs to be found.


	9. Bounded or Unbounded

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone reading this is doing okay, or at the very least is safe. The world will continue to have dangerous places and authorities will continue to fail us. It's our right and responsibility to fight back or to help those who've been harmed. That being said, and I've mentioned this before in my author's notes to a previous fic (an unhappy fact), I sincerely believe it's also our right and responsibility to step back every once in a while to rest our mind and recoup if only to help us return to fighting stronger than before. Please take care of yourself as you work to take care of others. I hope this chapter provides a welcome distraction. <3

They make love again on the mattress later that night. It’s too small to fit the both of them, and Sherlock’s legs spill over the sides as they move together on the sheet, but at least the sleeping situation is solved.

His hands clutch her hips and his back is curved so that he hides his face in the crook of her neck, while her arms loop under his to grip his shoulders. They slide slickly but urgently, thrusts ending in short bursts before they’re pulling back again. Her breath comes in sharp gusts against his hair.

This is what it means not to hide, Sherlock realizes, as their limbs tangle and they crush together in a kiss, though their eyes stay open, alert, shining. Even words are edited: softened or sharpened to achieve a certain reaction. But there is no forethought in a gasp of pleasure or editing in the fierce and frightening emotions that might flash in his eyes. Or hers.

It had been, he admits, partially why her offer for them to call each other ages ago had daunted him. He preferred to text because it was quick and simple and to the point. Crisp letters on a blank screen, directing the recipient on what to do. When it comes to phone calls, and the human voice with its varying tones and volumes and need to pause to take a breath, one could take all those minor quakes and gaps of silence and fill in everything someone is not saying.

“Let go for me,” comes her strained whisper into his ear, and with no further thought he follows her command.

Several minutes later he fights the weight of sleep so he can press up to her in the limited space of the mattress, to see the glow of pale moon on her shoulder as she reaches to switch on her MI6 mobile and stare at the contacts list. In the darkness the screen is bright and harsh.

“Waiting for them to summon you back to Istanbul?” he asks.

The light on her shoulder moves up and down like a shrug. “Getting restless.” She lets out a soft laugh. “Clearly.” She reaches her free hand backward to brush her knuckles over his bicep at that.

“They made yours look like brand new,” he remarks. Hers is also made to look like an iPhone, but even with the glare of the screen he sees it’s the latest model, sleeker than his, and without a scratch or dent in sight. “Mine looks secondhand.”

“Maybe you should’ve been assigned the identity of a wealthy Swede,” Irene quips. She switches off her mobile and the room plunges back into soothing blue. “May I see yours?”

He stands up on legs that seem as if they’ve forgotten how it feels to be vertical, then walks over to his coat, pushed to a heap on the floor by the desk. He fishes his MI6 mobile out of the pocket, walks back, and hands it to Irene.

The light from its screen illuminates her face, so that he sees her mildly surprised expression as he eases back down into the small space of mattress beside her.

“I’m the only one in your contacts?” she asks.

“You’re the only reason I have it,” he says.

That’s true in more than one way. It had been she, after all, who’d suggested he get a device like hers so that they could have their phone calls. He’d been reluctant at first to request one from Mycroft – but to his surprise, his brother had acquiesced (though not without a little grumbling) and had the false iPhone sent to Baker Street the very next day. It didn’t take Sherlock long to realize that this was probably the mobile that was meant to be his, had he taken on the Istanbul mission himself. Mycroft probably went through no trouble at all to procure it for him.

“I suppose I expected a contact from Secret Service to be on it, too,” Irene shrugs, switching off the device and putting it neatly down next to hers on the carpet. “But I imagine your brother wouldn’t want you a mile near this case any longer, no?”

He thinks of how Mycroft had ensured that, but also of how Mary had gone the length of eavesdropping to confirm it for herself. “As if that would have stopped me.”

Irene smiles at that, but it doesn’t last long. She turns to lie her head down so that he just sees her mane of black hair. They are pressed together in the narrow space, his chest against her back. It doesn’t seem like she’s settling down to doze off, though, despite all their activity. Perhaps she’s like him and can’t sleep when her mind is racing.

In the sliver of vision he has past the wall of her head and back, he sees that she keeps a hand stretched out towards the phones. She traces the side of hers lightly, slowly, as if touch alone might send a signal to MI6.

“It’s been a week,” he tells her, lips next to her ear. “You should be let back into Istanbul soon.”

Irene doesn’t answer immediately, though Sherlock sees her stop tracing her finger on the side of the screen, and she rests her hand on the space of carpet between her mobile and his. She lies very still.

“I’m not sure if I want to be,” she says, quietly, like she’s creaking a heavy door open, to let only a little cut of light inside.

It’s the closest thing to an admission to fear he’s ever heard her utter in the handful of hours they’ve spent together across their lives. That, and “Please.” It’s an understandable sentiment, especially when the reason you’d fled in the first place was because one of your allies had died with the enemy right at his door.

He counts the days of the past and the future. Over a month and a half. That’s how long she’s been on this mission. Four months. That’s how long Mycroft had predicted she would last before she was killed. Two and a half months before her probable death. Maybe her early success in capturing Terrence Waters has pushed that execution date back, or maybe it’s hastened it.

The window on the wall behind him casts a slant of moonlight into the room. It evades their corner entirely, ending in a sharp rectangle of light over the two phones. He and Irene, however, remain hidden from the night sky.

“It’s your only way back,” Sherlock says honestly. He himself has faced daunting tasks with fear – the impossible feat of faking his jump from St. Barts, the two years of destroying Moriarty’s criminal network, the violent solution to beating Charles Augustus Magnussen, whose only weapon was his mind. All of them had changed or taken away a little part of him. But, if he could accomplish horrific things like those and come out alive, he has no doubt that Irene can do even better.

His arm over her waist sinks slightly, and he realizes she’s let out a slow, gentle exhale. “A straight line from here to home,” she says.

“Curved line.”

Irene gives a soft laugh at his correction. “I prefer Euclid’s optimism.”

Euclid. A man referenced in the book at the foot of her mattress, _Relativity: The Special and the General Theory_ by Albert Einstein. Sherlock had read and memorized it over a decade ago for its invaluable deconstruction of several key concepts in Physics. The only disadvantage was his having to memorize all the sections on outer space, if only to add some more context to the chapters he actually cared about.

Euclid’s basic idea of geometry existed within a perfectly flat universe: a square is 360 degrees; a triangle is 180. Parallels never meet. Someone could walk and walk and walk in a straight line and never end up back where they started.

But the Earth itself, round, rapidly spinning, home of impossible and improbable things, already defies that. A giant square drawn on the ground would not make 360 degrees; the curvature of the Earth would make it bulge outwards. Parallel lines not only swell out of shape and then converge at the poles of the planet, but allow anyone who walked their length to form a complete circle.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity posits the same about the universe as a whole. It could not just possibly be a spread-out scatter of heavenly bodies, the distance from one solar system to another being a straight line that could be measured in kilometers. No: light and time bend and distort the empty space between these cosmic things. The universe could be shaped positively like a sphere or negatively like a saddle.

Sherlock thinks of how Irene has read the same book, and how she’s probably kept all this trivia saved in her head, too. He thinks of that phone call that feels like it happened eons ago, when she’d discussed satellites with him at the same speed and then mentioned the theory of relativity. It’s strange now to realize she’d probably learned all of that from reading _Relativity_ in this very room, bored and alone and biding her time.

“I think I prefer it, too,” he admits. Euclid’s flat geometry is simple and limited, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Irene’s hand is still half-caught in the moonlight, but he watches her retract it from their phones, back into the dark triangle that the window is unable to cast light over.

Without thinking Sherlock moves slightly forward and pressed his lips into her hair. The arm he has on her waist, he curls up to wrap gently over her shoulder. Irene’s hand moves up and cups his in place. She leans her back into his chest until they are wrapped completely together on the small mattress, where time and space are bent. He doesn’t have a care for anything beyond the diagonal shaft of light that divides them from the rest of the world.

For now, his universe is triangle-shaped.

* * *

When Sherlock next opens his eyes, he’s the only one in the room.

His arms are draped over nothing but the still-warm empty half of the mattress. He pushes up onto one elbow to look around.

Only his MI6 mobile remains in the rectangle of light that the window throws onto the carpet. Irene’s is gone.

His first instinct, accompanied with an inexplicable jump in his pulse, is that she’d been called back to Turkey and already left the building in a hurry. Why hadn’t she woken him up…?

But then Sherlock scans the room and sees that her bag is still in the corner, and her laptop still sits next to her stack of books. It’s only her phone missing and, when he squints to look at the pile of garments they’d left shed beside the desk, her clothes and trainers are gone.

Sherlock looks at the door: it’s shut, but every single lock is undone.

Did she go out to call MI6 herself? It’s unlikely they’d answer her, especially since she’s supposed to be on the down-low. She’s only one ongoing foreign intelligence mission out of several dozen.

Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he gets to his feet and picks his own device from the floor. He places it on the top of the desk as he goes to put his clothes back on, but there is a quiet dread inside him as he buttons up his shirt and rolls up his sleeves. There’s something wrong, and Irene apparently saw fit not to tell him.

He opens the door out to the hallway, which is as dark and ominously quiet as the office. She could have gone all the way down to the ground floor and traveled somewhere within town… or, he realizes as he creeps his way towards the fire escape, which waits at the very end, she could have gone up to the rooftop.

Sherlock steps out onto the steel balcony. The wind is cold and loud, whipping against his clothes and piercing his skin. He leans over the railing to look at the twelve floors below, the sharp drop to bare concrete. The Tivat mountainside looms ahead like a vast black shadow. No way to go but up.

He climbs the steps leading up to the rooftop, but even as he strains to listen he can’t hear anything over the roar of the wind save for his feet against the grating. Irene could be up there, or she could not. Perhaps he’s putting her in more danger by leaving himself out in the open like this.

It’s when he nears the top of the steps that he glimpses a dark silhouette over the ledge – the top of a head as its owner paces back and forth. It’s her. Sherlock reaches the final landing, though some weight seems to want to drop him straight back to the thirteenth floor.

Irene is turned away from him, standing against the backdrop of the bright night sky, wearing her shirt and jeans, her hair still wild and tossed. She holds her MI6 mobile to her ear with both hands, and her posture – shoulders squared, head lowered – signals to Sherlock everything he had hypothesized but hoped against. This is supposed to be secret. If she feels any guilt for hiding this from him, it doesn’t show.

She’s stopped pacing, instead resorting to tapping her foot in impatience as she keeps the device to her ear, probably as it continues to ring. Sherlock feels frozen to his spot at the top of the steps. The steel railing is cold, but his hand grips it tight.

After several seconds, she stops tapping and straightens. “Fatma,” she says into the receiver.

“Irene,” his voice suddenly finds its way past his lips.

She spins around, pulling the phone from her ear, eyes wide and stunned.

At the same time, the door to the interior stairwell swings open. A darkened figure steps out, something in the shape of a badge glinting against its chest.

 _“Tko si ti?”_ the figure shouts over the wind, in an alarmed male voice.

Irene whips back around to face the intruder just as Sherlock springs forward. _“To je bio nesporazum,”_ she shouts back, but the security guard has already begun to reach for his walkie-talkie as he moves toward her, and Sherlock lunges at him.

He grabs a hold of both the security guard’s arms with the intent of hauling him to the ground, but the Montenegrin savagely shoves forward till he can throw him against the ledge. Sherlock stumbles backward, flinging his hand behind himself to try and grab the edge for support, but it slips against the concrete – he hisses in pain as he tumbles to the ground, feeling his palm sting from the contact and blood coating his skin.

 _“Stani!”_ the security guard yells, but Sherlock blinks to see Irene swing her leg beneath him, sweeping his feet off the floor and making him fall swiftly on his side with a cry of surprise.

Without hesitation, Sherlock heaves forward so he can pull back his elbow and ram it right into the man’s temple –

There’s a sickening thud, and the security guard goes limp on the ground, out cold.

Sherlock stares at him for several seconds, panting, the shock from their brief fight temporarily overpowering the pain from the scrape of his hand against rocky concrete. He looks up at Irene.

Well, where Irene once stood. He hears the clunk of a shoe on the balcony, and he cranes his head to see that she’s already heading down the fire escape. With effort he pushes himself off the ground and follows her, leaving the unconscious man, the howling wind, the scene of covert betrayal, all behind.

* * *

Irene doesn’t say a word as she descends the steel steps. She hears Sherlock following close behind her, but she doesn’t turn to look.

“What the _hell_ was that?” he demands, breathless. Angry. She doesn’t answer as she pulls open the door into the thirteenth floor.

“Were you calling your teammate?” he persists as they trudge through the hallway, as she reaches the entrance into her hideout.

 _“Irene,”_ he snarls, though it seems to shut him up when she takes him by the wrist once they’re inside the office, and she drags him into the bathroom. It’s even darker in there, without the moonlight pouring in from a window. There, she switches on the tap, and water spurts out into the tiny, curved bowl of the sink.

“You were forbidden to contact Ayek until MI6 sent you back to Turkey,” Sherlock hisses at her, though his deep voice is lost somewhat under the deafening gush. “You could have made your location known to her captors or vice ve- _ah_ ,” he sucks in a pained breath as Irene grabs his arm and forces his injured palm under the running water, to rinse away the blood and the grains of dirt and concrete from his wound. She doesn’t look in his eyes, focusing instead on the dim red she can see on his hand, as it washes away.

As soon as it’s clean, Irene shuts off the water. Silently she walks to the desk, pulling a drawer open and retrieving a roll of bandage.

“Don’t ignore me,” Sherlock demands, but she focuses on wrapping the fabric around the scraped skin on his palm, sealing it perhaps a little tighter than necessary. “Irene.” She doesn’t look up.

Once his wound is properly bandaged, she turns away again and goes to a wall of the office that’s covered in her souvenirs. With one swift motion of her hands she tears the scarves and papers and photographs down, then crouches to gather as much of it as she can into her arms. She carries the wrinkled, rumpled pile towards her bag and starts to stuff inside as much of them as she can. It’s time to leave this building. It’s time to leave Montenegro, for good.

“Why did you have to hide that call from me?” Sherlock says, following her out from the bathroom, voice still hard and roughened. She goes to knock her stack of books into the inside of her bag, too. No matter that it’s heavy. She can’t leave a single trace of herself here.

“Listen to me!” he snaps as she turns to roll up her thin mattress. In the corner of her vision she sees his figure by the desk, towering and tense. “What the hell made you think that was rational at all?”

“Are you quite done?” Irene interrupts, and she finally meets his eyes. They shine with all the fury that colors his voice. He stands at the opposite end of the room, partly hidden in shadow, breathing heavily. She stays kneeling by the window, hands on her lap, back held straight.

“Why did you do that?” Sherlock says angrily, taking a step forward. “You’ve potentially jeopardized your safety _and_ your mission. What, you couldn’t have waited another day?”

“Fatma has practically all our remaining physical evidence in her possession,” she says as emotionlessly as possible. “There’s a vital piece of information I have in my spycam shots, but I need Waters’ actual mobile. I hold a puzzle piece in my hand and she holds the one that goes next to it. I need them joined as soon as possible. Every day that passes gives Shield and Browning another day to escape from us, to destroy whatever it is that connects my information with their operations – “

“You disobeyed direct orders,” he growls. “You put yourself and your teammate in danger. Didn’t you say you _didn’t_ want to return to Istanbul to finish this assignment? Why suddenly so enthusiastic?”

“ _You_ said it was my only way back,” Irene retaliates, her own irritation bringing her to her feet. She takes several hard steps toward him. “It’s either I complete this assignment or I never see England again. Why shouldn’t I pull out all the stops, then? Why shouldn’t I be doing every single thing within my power to return home?”

“It’s precisely the fact that it’s your only way back that you should be more careful than this,” Sherlock snaps. “Mistakes are fatal, Irene. The only alternative to not going home is that you’re going to die.”

“Then I’ll die!” she yells.

Sherlock falls silent and shrinks back as if stung. His lips are parted, and his eyes shine faintly in what moonlight fills the room, as if he’d just watched a monument topple. Irene realizes she’s digging her own nails into her palm, and uncurls her fist, though her fingers continue to shake at her side.

“I don’t owe it to you to stay alive,” she says, voice low. “It’s either I finish this and get what I want, or I don’t and then I won’t live to see it. That’s fine by me.” She bites the words out, as if she were sinking a knife into their meat. “Whatever someone else thinks doesn’t matter.”

For just a moment longer, Sherlock seems lost in his shock, in the horror of what she’s saying. He looks so young when he's unsure. But it only takes a few more seconds before his expression shifts and the tension melts from his face, and then he's simply standing there, calm, cold.

“Here I was worrying that the British Government had been treating you as one of their faceless pawns,” he says, and his voice is ice. “Turns out you’ve easily done it to yourself.”

She gives a bitter, cruel laugh. “And what are you? Their puppy?”

“Their citizen.”

Irene holds no internal debate. Her hand flies up and slaps him hard across his cheek. He lets out a shout of pain, his face knocked to the side. They’re frozen like that for several seconds, her staring him down, hand still burning from the impact, him panting and turned away from the light.

“That’s what you came here for, isn’t it,” she snarls. She wants to seize him by his hair and pull him back so that he can’t avoid her eyes, but she feels sick from the thought of touching him again. “You came to relish seeing me at my most miserable. Poor Irene Adler, look at what she’s had to resort to without me.” She drops her hand back to her side as she scoffs. “Gotten your fix yet?”

Sherlock blinks his eyes open at her specific choice of word, and he looks at her, paled, as if she’s trapped him into a corner.

Irene feels an unkind smile stretch across her lips. “You’re not my first junkie,” she says, and she hates that her voice is trembling so conspicuously. “I know how to deal with people like you; you’re all the same. I could toss you away so easily, just like you do with your filthy needles.”

“I’m sorry,” comes his voice, and it’s soft, but sure. “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”

No. _No._ He can’t hurt her then think that empty words fix anything. This is not his battleground and his rules don’t apply. He can’t come to her and then treat her this way and then leave her stranded –

Irene digs the heels of her palms into her eyes, taking a step backward. She lets out a furious, wounded sound. Nothing is right. It’s all his fault.

“Get out,” she says, not uncovering her eyes. “Get out, now. I have to leave this place.”

“Where will you go?” Sherlock takes her shoulders. His hold is warm against her. “What’s going to happen to you?”

Finally she tears her hands away from her face and stares up at him. “Why are you still asking me that?” Her voice is strained, still full of rage. “What do you even gain?”

“If you can’t answer for me, answer it for yourself!” he says, and she feels his nails dig subtly into her arms. He probably doesn’t even realize.

“I don’t need your permission to do _anything,”_ It’s spat with all the contempt she can muster. She brings her fists to his chest and pushes, threatening to shove him away.

“No,” comes Sherlock’s quieted, uneven voice. “You don’t.”

Irene blinks hard. Her vision adjusts a little more to the darkness, and she dares to look into his face. He’s still breathing hard, his lips are tense and trembling. His eyes still glint with emotion, but they’re partly shaded now beneath heavy, tired lids. His left cheek is still glaring red from her strike, suggesting the beginnings of a bruise.

She didn’t realize she’d slapped him so forcefully. Dazed, lost, for just a moment, she lifts a hand from his chest and touches it against his injured skin. Her fingers shake against his cheek.

Irene doesn’t know if he leans into her palm or if she presses it to his face. She doesn’t know if she pulls him down or if he pushes forward, but suddenly his mouth is over hers, and their hands are twisted in each other’s hair. They kiss fiercely, desperately, pushing against each other, teeth scraping skin and fingers scratching at each other’s clothes, and their gasps are harsh and loud.

It takes Irene another second to process it when Sherlock abruptly pulls away. When she opens her eyes, her face still heated and heart still pounding, she sees that he is flushed, aching too, but he’s staring at her like he doesn’t recognize her.

As her breathing slows, she feels like she might melt. Nothing in the last few seconds, in the last few hours, has made any sense.

Sherlock lets go of her shoulders.

After an eternity, he speaks.

“This ends. Now,” he says. Every word is heavy like a stone.

Irene is stunned, as Sherlock turns and bends to robotically collect his coat and bag from the floor. He doesn’t hesitate to straighten back up and make the last few steps toward the door.

Something snaps inside her and she moves forward. “Sherlock.”

He turns his head sharply, and his eyes are burning with surprise and almost anger.

She watches his eyes travel downward, to see that her hand has taken hold of his MI6 mobile that he’d left on the top of the desk. She hovers it barely an inch over the wood, as if about to lift it toward him.

He doesn’t move, but his face goes pale. Irene can’t bring herself to look away.

Time is frozen. They stare at each other even as the air grows cold. The moonlight and her scattered things serve as the only witnesses, though soon both will be gone from this room, too. This building, dated, dying, houses a supernova.

Irene lets go of the phone. It drops back to the desk with a muted clatter.

“Have a safe trip back home,” she says. Her face is a mask and her voice is a blank piece of paper.

Sherlock is still for a few more seconds. But then a veil falls over his face, too, and he straightens his back.

He turns away, pulls open the door, and makes sure to shut it behind him as he leaves that tiny room forever. A goodbye is unnecessary.

The silence is so noticeable now with him gone. Irene has to lean a hand on the desk as she looks around to survey what is now no longer her home. Aside from the mess, it’s as if the last twelve hours had never happened. She’s alone again, like she’s always been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) No major changes, but I went through a few previous chapters to correct my very inconsistent timeline. (Blame S4 for messing it up. No, seriously.) Hope it doesn't confuse anyone <3  
> 2) If I explain anything clumsily or flat-out wrong in the "science" portions of this chapter (quotation marks badly needed), please don't hesitate to let me know. I'm a lost cause for these kinds of concepts, even though they fascinate me to no end, hehe.  
> 3) Next week's update may be a day or so late. It's certainly finished, but I'm going to be incredibly busy the next several days because of a work event and I'm just not sure if I'll make it to my laptop in time to do my usual last-minute proofread. Update schedule will go back to normal after that, promise!
> 
> Again, take care everyone. I consider all of you my friends, and your safety and wellbeing are my concern, too <3


	10. Wormhole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A day late, as prophesied by yours truly. Thanks everybody for your patience! This is something of a breather ep after the emotional rollercoaster that is Montenegro. Enjoy.

Erasing any trace of you from a place you were never meant to be is a process not unfamiliar to Irene Adler. It’s fairly systematic: take everything you need and are able to keep, and destroy the rest, preferably by fire. In a nearly-empty Tivat office building in the dead of night, with an unconscious security guard up on the rooftop who could wake up at any second, her options are limited. She settles for putting whatever packets of food and bottles of water she can’t carry with her into plastic bags which she then tosses into the building’s outdoor skip. She does the same with her tiny mattress and its flimsy blue sheet, a sadly giant waste. She’ll miss that one.

The books and the souvenirs off the walls, she’ll keep. Picking up scattered photographs and scraps of cloth from the floor, Irene is single-minded in her goal of getting out of that room as quick as possible. That is, until she looks up and finds she’s at eye level with the surface of the desk, where Sherlock’s MI6 mobile still lays.

She freezes mid-reach of a Japanese brochure from the ratty carpet and stares at the phone. The screen is off, though in the dim moonlight it reflects faint blue. It’s virtually useless now, especially since its intended owner has abandoned it here. Being a device designed and built by the Secret Intelligence Service, she imagines it wouldn’t be easy to crush beneath her shoe. But it’s far too much of a risk to abandon it in any old rubbish bin.

That’s the reason she tells herself as she grabs the mobile and tosses it into her bag alongside her own, right before she leaves her Tivat hideout for good.

The sky is still dark and cold when Irene steps out onto the street in front of the office building. It won’t be sunrise for another three hours. There’s a dull sadness inside her to think that she’s leaving Montenegro the way she’d first come to it: quietly and secretly in the night, when she has always favored it in the glittering sunlight. She’s not going to enjoy having to find a new secret home in the Mediterranean.

So maybe it’s fate that it’s when Irene is standing outside the front of the Tivat bus station, looking up at its tall glass façade, that she gets the call from her London contact ordering her back to Istanbul.

“I don’t understand,” she says in a lowered voice into the receiver of her MI6 mobile, “It’s only been a week. They couldn’t have given up looking for us that quickly.”

“You’re in luck,” is the reply, though the truth to the statement is debatable. Her contact’s voice is disguised, artificially deepened, possibly so that Irene can’t reveal whom she’s coordinating with back in the UK if she was ever captured and tortured for information. “Some Romanian investigative journalist started publishing pieces on illegal activity among wealthy Eastern Europeans. The lieutenant generals have been busy chasing him off their tracks. Their backs are turned at the moment, which should give you and the Turk ample time to sneak back into the city.”

The “Turk” – referring to her associate, Fatma Ayek. Assigned the detainment and transfer of targets and collected evidence into the custody of MI6. She was the one Irene had attempted to contact just hours earlier in a fit of impatience. She had picked up, but hadn’t been able to say anything before Sherlock caught her there on the rooftop. All of it seems to have been a giant waste, now that she’s getting this call so soon after.

She tries not to think about it. “Alright, that’s good,” she says, “Shall I stay here to wait for the jet or will I have to travel to the capital?”

“Jet?” echoes the altered voice. “There is no jet. You’ll have to make your own way back to Istanbul. Good luck.”

Her contact hangs up, and Irene is left alone again in front of the bus station, a dim light shining from the inside, dutifully but sleepily churning with activity.

She faces a journey through Serbia and Bulgaria. With a last look at the bay, distant and still, she shoulders her bulky, painfully heavy bag, and walks forward. There’s no time to waste, not England’s and not hers.

* * *

_Thirty-two hours later_

Fatma Ayek is there too in the gloomy, run-down outdoor tram stop in Gaziosmanpaşa, a municipality on the Western edge of Istanbul. She stands by the exit beneath her black umbrella, and seems to have already laid eyes on Irene before she’d spotted her.

She is a tall and strong-shouldered woman, middle-aged, the brim of her dark brown hair casting a shadow over her eyes and long, straight nose. Her jaw is broad and squared, and her mouth is lined in a way that suggests she smiles often, though Irene has never seen her smile. She’s dressed in casual outerwear, an athletic jacket over office clothes, though her soldier-like stance, straight and steadfast, shows through. Irene doesn’t know anything about Fatma’s background, but she can tell she once served in the military… or, at least, some other armed group.

Her teammate relaxes her stance as Irene approaches, and lowers her umbrella now that the sky is simply grey and not raining. After having traveled for over a day, legs numb from sitting so long and back sore from falling asleep leaning sideways, Irene feels like it’s not her own body that moves towards Fatma. She feels like half of her is weighed down to the earth from her bag, full with books and two secret mobiles and the souvenirs that remind her that she had a history before this mission.

When they are a foot within each other, Fatma Ayek’s quiet face softens, and that serves as Irene’s only warning before suddenly the taller woman’s strong arms wrap around her.

It’s not exactly an embrace from a friend. It’s more like the obligatory comfort a mother-figure knows to provide the younglings in her brood, something practiced and automatic, but no less effective, at least to Irene’s numb and tired nervous system. Fatma seems experienced in acting as leader and superior among a group of novices. It makes Irene wonder why she’s here performing legwork for another country’s barely grateful Secret Intelligence.

Fatma pulls back several seconds later but keeps her hands on Irene’s shoulders. She frowns and looks her up and down and at her heavy bag. “You travelled far. Where did you go?”

Instinctively Irene goes tense, but she reminds herself that it’s safe now to speak. “Montenegro.”

“You called me from there?”

She feels the blood drain from her face, though she tries to keep as neutral an expression as possible. Of course Fatma wouldn’t act as if it never happened. “Yes.”

“Why?” Unlike Sherlock’s immediate, scolding anger, her teammate’s questioning is merely displeased, like something hadn’t gone according to plan.

But she can think of Sherlock later. “I need to see Terrence Waters’ mobile,” she tells her, straight to the point.

Fatma’s eyebrows quirk briefly, but then she shakes her head. “We can’t do this here.” They stand in the middle of a rush of Turkish passengers funneling into the exit, a lighted tunnel leading somewhere Irene doesn’t see. Once she goes through, she thinks to herself, she’ll be back in a city where two highly-trained former lieutenant generals and their fleet of minions want her dead.

The older woman takes Irene gently by the elbow. “Come on.”

* * *

The new “headquarters” selected by Fatma is a narrow, cozy flat within walking distance of the tram stop. The surrounding streets are crowded and smoky and the appliances are surely two decades old, but Irene doesn’t think she’s ever been more thankful for the sight of a complete kitchen, painted with yellow sunlight, and an actual bed.

Fatma had arrived around six hours earlier than Irene, so already her supplies are spread out over the kitchen’s long folding table. There are maps of Istanbul, scraps of paper, and a single old laptop. A jarringly low-tech setup, now that Lucien Palomer is gone.

“Have they not assigned us a new researcher?” Irene asks, dumping her bag onto the floor and then rubbing her shoulder.

Fatma takes a seat and lifts open the lid of her laptop. “I asked my handler the same question. But it appears they haven’t found one yet.”

“So it’s just us?”

Her teammate’s face softens sadly again “Yes. Just us.” She stretches an arm across the tabletop, pointing her fingers towards the chair opposite hers. Inviting Irene to sit, and also to talk. “Which is why you shouldn’t have risked calling me from Montenegro.”

Irene sinks into the chair. “There was information I needed that you had,” she says as evenly as she can. “I was afraid that the longer I waited, the less likely you’d still have the evidence with you.”

“You worried me,” says Fatma, and Irene is taken aback by the sincerity that tinges her voice. “I thought you were in danger. That’s why I chose to answer.” She frowns. “It worried me further that you hung up immediately. I almost called you back.”

“I didn’t mean to. A security guard caught me.” Half-truths make the best lies. Irene shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. MI6 ordered us to return to Istanbul right after that. Let’s get back to work.”

Fatma still looks at her sternly. Irene is sure she’s not showing the appropriate amount of remorse that her teammate had hoped for. But then the Turkish woman leans back in her chair. “Right. Back to work,” she says plainly, and her hand disappears under a pile of files on the table.

She pulls out a thick, padded envelope, unsealed, and shakes it till an iPhone falls out and clatters against the plastic tabletop. Terrence Waters’.

Irene stares at it for a long moment, then looks up. “You didn’t turn it over?” She’s relieved, but surprised.

Fatma shrugs. “Waters won’t talk, according to my handler. And judging by our lack of a replacement for Palomer, your Secret Intelligence doesn’t intend to assist us beyond our weekly allowance. I realized long ago that we will have to take matters in our own hands.” A brief upward flash of her eyes towards Irene, before returning her gaze to the piece of evidence. “While keeping safe, of course.”

Irene’s lips tighten in acknowledgement. Fine, no more disobeying direct orders. She closes her fingers around the gadget and pulls it near. She’d agonized over this tiny metal box miles away in another country for a week, and now it fits so easily and automatically in her hand. With a steady breath she taps the power button, lighting up the screen, then navigates into Waters’ drafted messages.

There is her smoking gun, or at least the closest thing to it she’s managed to obtain. An unsent message, dated to the day she’d lured Waters into a hotel room and knocked him out, written just over ten minutes before. _2000 daire. 9:43PM._

“I’m no detective,” she hears Fatma say in front of her. “I looked at that phone while I was in hiding, but I gathered nothing beyond what you and Palomer had told me before. What was it you needed to see?”

“’Two thousand daire’ was what killed him,” Irene says quietly, her gaze still on the screen. “He’d looked into it after I passed it to him, and soon after that someone we didn’t know tried to hack into our private database. They must be tracking who searches this phrase.”

“Really?” says Fatma. “It’s a strange code, but not so obscure. I don’t know what ‘two thousand’ refers to, but _daire_ is the Turkish for ‘circle’.”

Irene closes her eyes. She’d been able to find that out, too, but it didn’t make anything clearer. “Circle” could also mean a small, exclusive group. But what does ‘two thousand circle’ mean?

She lowers the phone, and finds herself staring at the commuters’ map of Istanbul that Fatma had had laid out on the table. Her eyes fall on the name of the hotel at the edge of the city where she’d encountered Terrence Waters. She and Palomer had located it after theorizing that the lieutenant generals recruited new buyers by moving around the perimeter, not in a spiral, but in –

-  a circle…

Irene abruptly pushes back from the table and stands up. Fatma, of course, stares up at her with wide eyes.

“Do you have a pen,” Irene asks breathlessly. One finds its way into her hand, and she bends to draw a ragged oblong that roughly follows the perimeter of Istanbul. But the bottom quarter of the “circle” goes not over land, but the Sea of Marmara, like a large slice had been taken out of a pie. The southern slice.

She puts Terrence Waters’ iPhone next to the outline, and swipes to his Sent Messages folder.

At the top is the message whose recipient had eluded her her since the beginning. _I feel as if the city’s most alive at high noon or late into the night. There is no dusk or dawn on the clock of Istanbul._ Sent by Terrence Waters to a Vanna Çalık.

There is no dusk or dawn on the clock of Istanbul.

“The city is a clock,” Irene blurts, like the air’s been knocked out of her. “He was giving a recruit directions.”

“What do you mean?” Fatma prods, leaning forward.

Irene traces her finger over the inky line she’d drawn on the map. “They only frequent establishments on the perimeter of the city, like Palomer and I had guessed. But they keep to the north, west and east, because the south of the map is only sea. If the ‘circle’ of Istanbul were a clock, it would have no five o’clock to seven o’clock.” She spins the iPhone to face Fatma so she can read the message on the screen. “‘No dusk or dawn on the clock of Istanbul’.”

She meets Fatma’s urgent stare. “We’ve been reading the text wrong. Not ‘two thousand’, but ‘twenty hundred’.” She takes the ballpoint pen again and scrawls _20:00 DAIRE_ on the corner of the map. Dropping the pen again, she jabs her finger onto a western point of the outline: the hotel where she’d captured Waters. “He was giving her directions to where he was at the time. Eight o’clock on the circle.”

“No wonder they went for Palomer after he searched ‘2000 daire’ on the internet,” Fatma says, flattening a palm on the tabletop. “They were looking to verify if he was a buyer they’d spoken to.” She stands up, gaining her height back over Irene, and pushes her hand forward to touch the tips of their fingers. “The recipient of that text is from a very wealthy local family. If Waters didn’t finish recruiting her, Browning and Shield surely have.”

“Now that we know their code we can reach out to her and find out where and when the next sale is,” Irene follows her line of thought. “And take them both out at once.”

Fatma takes her hand fully now. “This jumps everything forward. We could be home in a month or so.”

Irene feels her heart lurch in her chest, though she doesn’t know why it comes with a throb of pain. “Yes,” is all she can respond.

Fatma lets go of her hand and drops back into the chair, which scrapes noisily on the tile from her sudden movement. She lets out a laugh, in the most relaxed state that Irene has ever seen her. “Can you believe I just live on the other end of this country,” she says, “In a city called Van. You have farther to travel, and yet I’m the one grinning.”

Irene sits down too, and tries to return a gentle smile. “You’re returning to people you miss?”

“Yes. My family.”

Irene raises her brows. “Your parents?”

“No, my husband and children,” Fatma replies, and she reaches into the inner pocket of her jacket. The sound of a rustle of glossy paper, and she pulls out a creased picture: it’s of her with shorter hair and nicer clothes, pressing up to a round, bearded man, between them a little girl and two boys. Behind them is the blur of a tourist-dotted castle site. “They’re waiting for me back home. Right now my Rahmi is looking after the children with his sister.”

“Do they…” Irene dares to move her hand and trace her fingers over the white frame of the photo, “…know what you do?”

“Oh, god, no,” says Fatma. “They think I’m teaching English in training centers around the continent.” She brushes away a curtain of dark hair. “Ah, one knows. My eldest, who took this photo. He’s studying in America now.”

“Your son knows?” Irene feels awed and slightly dizzy; she could never imagine a family with this dynamic. “What does he think?”

Fatma smiles more widely now, and Irene sees the lines around her mouth bend beautifully. “He’s found some leads that will break his investigation of an art forgery operation wide open. Asking me when I’ll finish with this assignment to join him in Chicago and assist.” She seems to notice Irene’s baffled expression, and waves a hand. “I told him, however, no legwork until he graduates. I’d rather he keeps safe of course. Not to mention, no one could ever believe a rosy-faced eighteen year old claiming he has paintings of Turkish masters to trade.” The older woman tilts her head, as if regarding Irene up and down. “They would believe someone who looks like you, though.”

Irene lowers her eyes, keeping back a laugh. “Pardon me. I think I’d rather take a break from traveling after this is all over.”

“Right, of course. You have a home to go back to yourself.” Fatma’s voice is kind and warm, like a new-made friend’s. “I’ve boasted of mine too long. Who is waiting for you, then?”

Sherlock Holmes.

“It’s just me, I’m afraid,” Irene says, though her tone isn’t hostile. “I’ve not been in London for a long time. I just want to go back and rest.”

Fatma nods. Thankfully she doesn’t look dramatically sympathetic. “The sooner we take down Shield and Browning, the sooner you can do that. I promise, Adler.”

Irene squares her shoulders. “I promise you you’ll see your family soon.”

Fatma smiles a final time. They had been so driven to take down their three targets in the first month of this assignment that the two of them had never had a conversation this long or this intimate. She’d never accomplished it either with Lucien Palomer when he was alive. Teammates on a suicide mission aren’t meant to grow close, in any case. There is always the possibility that neither of their promises to each other will come true.

The more solidly she feels her feet on the kitchen tile, the more of the musty air of the flat that she inhales, the less real her week hiding in Montenegro seems. A pocket of stolen time, like she’d reached through a black hole and pulled out a handful of hours from the past if only to feel alive again. And now the only evidence left of it is the abandoned MI6 mobile in her bag, which contains nothing but her name.

Maybe that was all she had in common with Sherlock Holmes. Stolen time.

She closes her eyes briefly and tries to tell him goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- My "face cast" for Fatma is Turkish actress Vahide Perçin. I know it's kind of cheating for an author to just reference an existing person to serve as visual description for a character, but I spent so long staring at her face to construct Fatma's introductory paragraph I just felt it would be ethical to give credit, lol.  
> \- Next week's update will have no delay. See you all from Sherlock's end!  
> \- UPDATE 6/1/2017: I'm an idiot. I wrote the wrong "translation" for 20:00 and made it 10:00PM instead of 8:00PM. D'oh! Fixed it now.


	11. Visible Light

_“Miss me?”_

Jim Moriarty’s voice is a deathly whisper in his ear.

Sherlock blinks hard for a second, and again he is outside the grand house of the Welsborough family. John Watson and DI Lestrade stand behind him at the doorway, sparking with questions and praise, though he barely listens. The memory of their desperately uninteresting case is already fading. Something about a car? A dead son?

What he does recall is their missing plaster bust of Margaret Thatcher, how the only suggestion that it had ever been there was an ugly gap on a tabletop and scratches on leather. What does it mean when you’re remembered only for the empty space you left behind?

He doesn’t know why his thoughts had jumped immediately to Moriarty upon seeing that incomplete Thatcher shrine in the Welsboroughs’ sitting room. Something about intuition, he’d told John.

But truth be told, he’s been trusting his own mind less and less these days. It’s like living in a house some intruder has secretly been living in with him, who steals things away from their original places or leaves things where they shouldn’t be. It puts empty, black gaps across the timeline of his past, and at the same time puts visions, entire people, before him in the present, when he knows they’re not really there.

Sometimes when he confers with John or Mary or the Yard via face chat, he thinks he sees some grainy, pixelated spectre walk by at the edge of the screen. If he sits in his chair at night and falls into deep thought, and his eyes begin to sting from the glow from the fireplace, he might see that same person’s familiar shadow thrown across the carpet.

He’s been blocking it out lately with countless cases. For the most part, it succeeds, and for the past week he’s been busier than ever. But there are times when he catches himself remembering the current date, or glancing at the nearest calendar in whatever room he’s in, and a voice inside him whispers _six weeks._ Or _one month._ Or _twenty-five days._

The length is shorter and shorter every time.

* * *

“You’re in a good place.”

“Come again?” comes John’s voice somewhere above him.

Sherlock is crouching on the sidewalk, scratching behind the ear of Toby, their sweet, lumbering companion for the day. The dog had been friendly and quiet, but he certainly was no help in tracking down the so-far elusive bust smasher. He looks up to meet eyes with John, who stands over them, Rosie strapped into a carrier on his front, her legs kicking happily in their pink tights. Mary is just a few feet away, answering a call from the clinic.

“You’re in a good place,” Sherlock repeats. “Don’t you think?”

His friend’s brows pull together. Rosie’s head tips back, her bunny-eared hood falling to reveal a crown of wispy, blonde hair. Without even glancing, John reaches up and gently pulls the hood back over her head. “Dunno what you mean.”

“You’ve got Mary with you, safe and sound. She keeps you happy. And a daughter to keep you both busy.” Sherlock strokes his hand down Toby’s long, floppy ear, and the dog still stares ahead absentmindedly but he leans into the touch. “And there’s me, for when you’re bored.”

John seems speechless for a few seconds, and then he lets out a small, almost forced laugh as he shakes his head. “I don’t, er, keep people in my life ‘cause I need them for one specific purpose.”

“Need’s got nothing to do with it. I only mean that everything in your life right now does something good for you.” Sherlock brushes the dust off his trousers as he stands up, holding Toby’s leash in his hand. “It’s a difficult thing to achieve. I’m happy for you, but you shouldn’t dare to risk losing any of it.”

John’s mouth works. He seems fairly unsettled by this impromptu lecture. “You... alright?”

“Never been better,” says Sherlock. “Rosie’s spit up on you.”

His friend blinks a few times before processing what he’s said, then swears as he stumbles back to look down at the bright splotch his daughter had generously gifted to his dark jacket. She merely gives a delighted squeal at the sudden movement.

John turns around and staggers away, just as Mary comes walking back up to them. He fluidly reaches into the bag she has slung over her shoulder to pull a small blue towel out from it to clean himself off. Mary eyes him with fond amusement, though directs her attention back to Sherlock. “Something’s got you down.”

“Nothing’s matching up. Nothing connects.” Sherlock runs a hand through his hair. “I think – I _know_ – it all leads to Moriarty somehow.”

Mary frowns. “No, see, that’s what’s hindering you. Treat it like any normal case. You’re putting too much pressure into every little thing to be that one big clue that puts it all together.”

“Nothing’s a ‘normal case’,” Sherlock snaps, though he draws back in regret. He’s brimming with frustration, but Mary, and not even John, should be on the receiving end of any of it. “Nothing can be. With Moriarty’s threat hovering over us I need to protect the three of you no matter what.”

Mary’s shakes her head. “Missing the point again.” She reaches up a hand and puts it firmly on Sherlock’s shoulder. She draws in a slow, steady breath before speaking. “It might be the people you’re _not_ able to protect.”

He’s about to respond in confusion, but then her implication sinks in, and Sherlock’s lips tighten. In all these months she’s never talked about this, not since they were in Mycroft’s office. It feels almost like they’re breaking a pact now, especially with John so close by, able to overhear. But Mary looks so sure, and her eyes shine with sincerity.

“This is me, protecting you,” she says, and her next words are lined with a smoldering fire, like a flame meant to cauterize a wound. “Steel yourself for whatever’s most likely to happen.”

Sherlock abruptly wrenches his shoulder out from her grasp as if he’d been burned. Mary lets go and backs off, though there is pain and frustration showing clearly on her face. Is she disappointed in him? Worried? She holds her stare with him for a moment longer before turning around to help John with wiping Rosie’s spittle off his front. Her smile at them is warm and full of humor, as if her conversation with him just a few seconds ago had never happened.

Toby nudges at his hand with his soft nose, hopeful for another scratch behind the ear.

* * *

Later, it’s a quiet and jewel-toned dusk. Sherlock leans an arm heavily against window and watches the cars pass on the street below.

He feels utterly drained, despite having a fairly intriguing case in progress. The continuous supply of adrenaline that typically comes with one thrums somewhere inside him, to be sure, but it seems to be battling against a great weight, one that threatens to push him to the ground. Perhaps it’s the lack of leads, or the overwhelming abundance of them. Perhaps it’s all these distractions that keep him from figuring out the right direction to go. He just needs a sign.

His mobile buzzes on the table.

Sherlock nearly jumps at the sound. It’s the trademark call alert programmed into any iPhone. He’s gotten so used to a more generic, blaring ring being the thing to the silence in his flat.

Recovering, he goes and picks the device up, and sees that it’s from an unlisted number. Something in his chest lurches, but he doesn’t know why. He swallows, then taps to accept the call. “Yes?”

“Mr. Holmes!” says a mildly familiar male voice. “This is Noah, from operations in SES S.A.”

The satellite company in Luxembourg. He’d become so drawn into the Thatcher case, he hadn’t thought of following up with them since he’d returned from – from mainland Europe.

“You’ve found something?” Sherlock asks, immediately focused, brushing away his earlier panic.

“Ah, more like, we’ve worked out why we’ve found nothing,” replies Noah. His accent is something between Dutch and softened German. “It’s due to co-location, Mr. Holmes.”

Co-location. In his initial research on satellites, Sherlock had briefly come across the term. Communications satellites are typically launched and spaced far apart, for even distribution of transmissions and to avoid interference of one signal with another. But there are some times when two satellites are deliberately placed close together –

“Satellites Astra 2E and Astra 2F were both performing beneath capacity at the time of the Moriarty broadcast,” Noah continues. “To remedy this, we drew them within the same coordinates to combine their power and have them function temporarily as a single satellite until we were able to get them back into shape. Any error in our transmissions at the time would have been written off as birthing pains. No wonder we have no records of a hacking attempt, Mr. Holmes. They had struck where we were already wounded.”

So his first theory ages ago had been correct, partly. Whoever had sent out the Moriarty videos had taken advantage not of one of SES’s dormant backup satellites, but a pair of malfunctioning ones. Sherlock suddenly feels as if the dark road ahead of him had come alight with towering lampposts on either side. “Astra 2E and 2F. They service this area of Europe, then?”

“The UK and Ireland, to be specific,” says the SES employee. “A perfect angle for someone in your country to transmit their own signal from – but it would have been _very_ powerful. Our satellites may glitch at times, Mr. Holmes, but they are not defenseless.”

“The person I’m hunting down is more powerful than you think. If anyone could have done it, it was them.” His hand is hovering over his coat, draped over the back of his chair. “As long as you’re telling me it _is_ possible a foreign signal could have interfered with yours?”

“Difficult, but yes, possible,” Noah replies. “They would have had to hack past three layers of security, but if they succeeded, they could have done anything with 2E and 2F’s power. Disrupt television signals, radio, even transmit communications to, say, private satellite phones.”

Sherlock feels his fingers tense momentarily as he takes a hold of his coat, but he forces himself to relax. He blinks hard. “Are both operating this moment?”

“Yes. In fact you can view them in the night sky over your hometown. Well, it would be easier with a telescope.”

That’s all the encouragement he needs. “Thank you. I’ll call again soon,” Sherlock tells him, and hangs up and grabs his scarf. Time to try and relive a childhood memory, he thinks.

* * *

He reaches Mycroft’s house after the sun has already set, and the sky is perfectly dark and still. His brother isn’t home at the moment, though his security detail at the door recognizes him and lets him in without question (if a narrowed, suspicious stare before quietly stepping aside could count as “without question”). Sherlock sweeps past the grand sitting rooms, the ornate door into his main office, to climb the staircase that leads all the way up to the house’s rooftop.

Mycroft’s Orion SkyView Pro 8" Equatorial Reflector Telescope, a showy gift from a friend in the Royal Family, is a heavy, silver goliath of an apparatus. In stark contrast to the antiquated, almost gothic décor of his house’s interior, it’s an aggressively futuristic-looking thing, more like a short steel cannon than a classic telescope. It’s perched on a sturdy black tripod mount that nearly matches Sherlock in height, and is tilted back to look skyward. He doubts his brother almost ever uses the device for its intended purpose, which is to observe the moon and stars and even nearby nebulae. But London’s light pollution probably prevents most of those celestial objects from being seen, and Sherlock only needs to find something much closer to home.

He bends to bring his eye to the tiny eyepiece that sits on top of the barrel. It’s aimed at nothing in particular, so he’s greeted with a flat plane of dark night sky. He gently pushes the device till he comes across a blur of white, then pulls away to locate the focusing knobs. It takes a moment for him to understand how to operate them; state-of-the-art astronomy telescopes aren’t something he’s ever been compelled to learn about, and they’re not as similar to microscopes as expected. But after a few experimental twists he peers into the eyepiece again, and the blurry white is replaced by the clear, crisp texture of the face of the full moon.

Sherlock suddenly feels a chill at the back of his neck. It spreads down his spine and to the tips of his fingers, even to the rims of his lips, until he realizes it’s because his mouth has fallen open.

He’d never considered before that the moon might have such a ragged, rock-like surface. Staring up at it as a young boy, he’d assumed it was paper-smooth, the irregularities in color merely smudges of dirt. Proximity, it seems, teaches you all manner of surprising things. Distance, more so.

He maneuvers the telescope away and back to the empty sky. The stars are slightly bigger than before, bright and blinking so that he has to pull away and blink hard a few times. Then he leans back to nudge the view just a little more, and adjusts one of the smaller focusing knobs without having to look at them, and – there it is.

One might have mistaken it for a fly sitting on the lens of the telescope. Its wings are flung out on either side, though they are rectangular, long, and made of mirror. They attach with thin, silvery poles to the main body, a complicated steel box with dishes, antennae, and tiny cylinders sticking out from it. It floats quietly through space, though glows in an almost ethereal white with the remaining reflection it’s caught from the sun. This is it. His tenuous connection with the ghost that broadcasted Moriarty’s face across all of England. Already it’s drifted halfway past the field of sight his telescope has captured, ready to slip from his reach.

It’s then when he hears the door behind him click open, and the tap of an expensive shoe. “Playing pirate again, are we?”

“Ahoy,” Sherlock responds drily. He doesn’t turn away from the telescope. “Much nicer prop this time around.”

“You do realize,” says Mycroft, “The reason I let you come and go as you please within my own home is so we can spend time as family, not so you can use all my things while I’m not around.”

“You never use this. It still has the plastic on the accessory tray.”

“Not the point.” The door swings closed. “I need to know what you did after you left Luxembourg.”

Sherlock’s hand on the focuser pauses momentarily. Then he moves it to tripod handle to nudge the barrel and follow the path of the satellite. “I came home, obviously. Is my standing here confirmation enough, or do you need video evidence and corroboration from National Security?”

“You know what I mean,” says Mycroft; he’s veered into an impatient tone sooner than usual. “I’m referring to the day and a half unaccounted for in your itinerary. You have me give my name to your new pals in Betzdorf, then I don’t hear back after that for several hours.”

That pulls Sherlock away from the telescope. “You really sat and waited around for me, biting your fingernails?”

“What else am I to do when informed that a plane from Luxembourg landed in Heathrow with an empty seat booked by a Sherlock Holmes?”

“Quit tracking my flights, for one.” He turns back to look into the eyepiece, though he’s not really trying to observe the satellite anymore.

“I’m asking you for your side of the story because I want to give you a chance.”

Sherlock can’t stop the acidic laugh from escaping him. “No. You’re asking me because you already know where I was.”

For several seconds there’s silence, only the distant rumble of London in the evening.

Then, quietly, Mycroft says, “Yes.”

Sherlock closes his eyes. He lets out a soft, slow breath, his grip on the tripod handle suddenly weak. Of course nothing would escape Mycroft Holmes’ notice. Not because he has the resources of the British Government at his disposal, but because he’s his older brother, one who had sworn long ago that he would always look after him. Who could protect you from your protector?

“I don’t know the specifics,” Mycroft admits. “Just that you flew into Montenegro, then out of it the very next morning.”

“Relax. She didn’t tell me anything I wasn’t supposed to know.” It’s the first time he’s referred to her directly for the past several days, and he almost feels an ache in his throat. He shuts one eye and peers at the wing of the satellite still within view, lest his mind try to conjure another spectre of her to distract him with.

“That’s not what matters,” Mycroft snaps. “Honestly, Sherlock. What was the point of going through all that trouble of getting you, a non-agent, a mobile from MI6, if you weren’t going to bloody use it? Heavens knows _I_ wasn’t keen on the idea of you speaking with her everyday.”

“Why don’t you ask _her,_ ” Sherlock bites back. His voice is slightly raised, but he keeps his words low, squared, to stop himself from seeming too affected. “In any case, you needn’t worry about her being a bad influence on your poor impressionable brother any longer. I left the mobile in Montenegro.”

“You what.”

“We had a disagreement, and I decided I didn’t want to have any calls with her any longer.” To be more descriptive would be to recreate the scene itself in his mind in frightening clarity, and he refuses to experience it all over again. “I left it with her.”

“You actually – “ he hears Mycroft let out a grunt of absolute, unrestrained exasperation. He imagines him dropping his face to his palm. “That’s not – for god’s sake, Sherlock. All _my_ questions aside, that wasn’t yours to give away. I… Christ.” He draws in a tired breath. “I’ll have to speak to MI6.”

“Please,” Sherlock snarls, and he waves a hand behind him. “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not lost, just transferred. Just track her and you’ll know where she is.”

“I don’t.” That captures Sherlock’s notice, and he turns to look at his brother, his brows drawn together. Mycroft drags his hand over his face again. “I’m not the omniscient superpower you trust me to be, you know. MI6 had only reached out to me last Christmas because they wanted _you_ for the job. As soon as I referred Irene Adler as your replacement, and they took her in, they cut me out of the loop. I’ve no idea how much progress she’s made or hasn’t made.” He straightens his back and tightens his mouth, as if having to say this is the most painful thing he’s ever had to do: “You _probably_ know more than me.”

Sherlock scowls. “There, didn’t it feel just so nice to let that off your chest?” He faces back to the telescope, though he doesn’t look through the eyepiece. He simply stares up at the full, round, imperfect moon above them with his own two eyes. “Go. Talk to MI6 if it puts you at ease.”

“It won’t, but I have to,” says Mycroft, sounding tired. “They’ll demand compensation for the misplaced phone, but at least they’ll be more informative than you’re being now. Not that I want anything more to do with this woman.”

“That makes two of us.”

Silence again. No movement heard from Mycroft, like he’s about to say something in response, though Sherlock doesn’t turn his head to confirm it. Down below, the sound of passing cars on the street.

The roar of their engines is punctuated by the click of the door. His brother is gone, and Sherlock is alone again on his rooftop. He looks into the eyepiece of the great telescope a final time, but the satellite is nowhere to be found, leaving in its wake only empty space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Astra 2F and 2E are actual satellites currently servicing the UK, though thanks to S3 + S4's weirdo timeline I can't say for sure they were the ones in operation during the Moriarty broadcast. And, again, apologies to anyone who's more knowledgeable about satellites; let me know if I said something embarrassingly wrong.  
> \- The Orion is a real astronomy telescope that you can buy online, provided you have a spare US$700.00.  
> \- Don't worry, Irene and Sherlock won't stay apart for as long as you might be thinking. (But no, they won't reunite by next chapter, lol) Let's just say next update gets a lot of stuff done. Thanks again to everyone for reading! :)


	12. Acceleration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor warning: graphic descriptions of violence ahead.
> 
> Enjoy!

Sofia von Benning, heiress to the enormous fortune of a reclusive Swedish business mogul, currently vacationing in the bustling city of Turkey while the snow melts back home, and who bears a striking resemblance to the late Irene Adler, steps out of a limousine onto the cobblestone street, and looks up at the moonlit façade of the beachside clubhouse.

She is in Beykoz, a lush northern district of Istanbul. Or, as the last text called it, _100 daire._

When she’d first reached out to Vanna Çalık, inquiring how she might be able to join Daire’s illustrious, secretive group of customers, the Turkish aristocrat had been understandably wary. But she warmed up eventually after weeks of correspondence, into which Sofia von Benning worked in information that suggested she knew Terrence Waters personally, as if he’d been in the process of recruiting her also… before his unfortunate disappearance. There’s conveniently a lot you can learn about a person when you knock him out in a hotel room and search his body and phone, then have him transferred into the custody of your Secret Intelligence Service.

So here she is, standing outside the newest meeting place of the organization she’s been tracking down for months. Inside, among the hundred or so patrons, are a handful of Europe’s wealthiest, there at the beckoning of two former lieutenant generals of the British Army. Peter Browning and Margaret Shield. If she can isolate them from the rest of the club, she can end this within the next twenty-four hours. She could be on a jet home in twenty-five.

She stands in her svelte red cocktail dress and nude pumps, her hair swept up and pinned flawlessly into place, before the inflow of equally chic guests into the clubhouse’s main entrance. A taller, older woman in a suit, hair slicked back into a bun and face partly concealed with shades, goes up next to her. “Are you ready?”

For just a few seconds, Sofia von Benning’s serene cat’s smile falls to reveal Irene Adler, serious. “Yes.”

Fatma nods discreetly, and turns to hand the keys of the very much stolen black limousine to the valet. Irene walks down the short paved path, Fatma following close behind her, to the entrance, where two doormen stand, one behind a mahogany podium.

“Member, Madam?” asks one of them, tall and square-shouldered, the champagne-colored light of the interior so bright he’s almost all silhouette.

“Guest,” Irene answers in Sofia’s voice, slightly higher-pitched than her own, and with a measured Swedish accent. She puts a slender finger on the edge of the podium, pointing at the records book. “Sofia von Benning. I’m listed as Miss Vanna Çalık’s companion.”

He drags the end of a pen down the page, then taps it once. “Yes, Madam, you are here. May I see identification, please?”

Irene smoothly pulls out from her bejeweled clutch MI6’s counterfeit driver’s license, complete with a photograph of her face. A glance, then the doorman nods, and his partner steps aside to let her through.

“My bodyguard,” she gestures behind her to Fatma, who stands with her hands folded in front of her, “She carries a gun. My father’s orders. Is this allowed?”

“We must take down her name, Madam, it is policy.”

“Of course,” Irene says, with Sofia’s smile. The best way to smuggle in a weapon, it seems, is to announce that you have it. “Show them your gun license, Devran.”

Once allowed in, they find themselves in a vast, ballroom-like lobby, with marbled floors and almost ceiling-high doorways that lead out to the beachside or to adjacent, narrow halls. There’s a modest number of guests standing around, chatting, most of them congregating at the long bar. Past them one can see the shore of the Black Sea, shrouded in the darkness of night. There is an ominously gentle wind that rolls through the ballroom, only subtly disturbing the flowing white curtains and the crystals dangling from the chandelier.

Irene takes Fatma’s arm. “Devran, I need to use the loo. Won’t you help me find it?”

They enter the luxurious, amber-colored restroom, and Fatma promptly locks the door. She turns to face Irene and, eyes not leaving hers, she pulls a small handgun from her suit jacket’s inner pocket. “I suggest to keep it in your bra. Not your purse; you might drop it in action.”

Irene reaches for the gun without hesitation, already a step ahead – underneath her sleeveless cocktail dress she wears a sports bra with a holster on the side, underneath her arm. The weapon would be easily drawn by reaching in through her dipping neckline or even through the armhole.

As the gun passes between them, Fatma suddenly clasps over it, sandwiching Irene’s hand between both of hers. “I’ll be close by at all times. But my priority is my own life, as your priority should be yours.”

It’s a cold assertion, in contrast to the last few months they’ve spent working closely together, and to their promises that the other will see home again soon. But she certainly wouldn’t blame her for saying it, especially when she has a husband and children waiting for her. And they’re precisely the frank, detached words that Irene needs to hear to help her sharpen her focus to laser accuracy, so that her goal is clear: take down Browning and Shield so that Fatma can easily apprehend both, and get out alive.

She nods. Fatma nods back. “Good luck, Adler.”

They exit the restroom, donning the faces and stances of their disguises once more. In the center of the room stands her contact Vanna Çalık, a round, radiant woman whose blonde highlights match her glittering dress. She’s chatting with a thin, elegantly-dressed man whose back is turned to them. Every few seconds they both bow their heads to laugh over some little joke.

When Vanna’s head lifts back up, she meets eyes with Irene across the room, and a smile of recognition forms on her face. Irene shoots a smile back, and begins her walk towards the pair. All the while, she senses Fatma just a few paces behind her, silent and invisible, but alert.

Vanna meets her in the middle and immediately links arms with her. This is their first meeting in person, and they know each other’s appearances only from trading Facebook profiles (for Sofia, it was a manufactured one), but already the Turkish aristocrat regards her like an old friend. “I’ve been promoting you all evening, dear. Don’t disappoint!”

Irene tilts her head back in a twinkling, tailor-made laugh for Sofia. “Won’t you book me an evening with Prince Harry next, my talented Vannie? I like to collect my Britons in threes.”

“They’re not charming company, but you should see how they flutter when they manage to please,” Vanna quips, and they slow to a stop before the slim man she’d been speaking to a moment earlier. He still doesn’t face them, preoccupied with murmuring a request to a waiter who’s tilted close to listen. “Peter, here is the Swedish demi-goddess I’ve been raving to you about.”

The man straightens, bringing his silver, slicked-back hair into view, and turns. The sudden drop in Irene’s stomach doesn’t crack her veneer of practiced pleasance when she sees it’s former Lieutenant General Peter Browning, gaunt and bearded and dark-eyed.

“Madam von Benning.” A sophisticated RP accent, rehearsed to perfection to almost completely conceal his original. He sweeps his eyes over her, possibly calculating the value of her dress, her jewelry. He takes Irene’s hand and creaks down to press his lips to her knuckles. “A demi-goddess, indeed.”

“So here is the eminent Peter Browning,” she says silkily, accepting his kiss, “Oh, how long I’ve wanted to meet you.” Briefly she peers past him to see two bodyguards of his own, possibly two of the soldiers he stole away from Syria. They stand like statues, though Irene can feel their eyes fixed squarely on her.

“Madam Çalık tells me you’re quite eager to attend one of our… auctions,” Browning says.

“She claims to have a mouthwatering offer for you,” Vanna twitters, “So good is it that she hasn’t even told me the value.”

At that, the silver man raises his brows, and a smile seems to curl wider beneath his mustache. Irene is unsettled, though it’s from sheer mastery that she succeeds in not showing it. “Is that so?”

Irene blinks sweetly. “I courted dear Vannie for months just to get a private audience with you.”

“A private audience we shall have,” Browning replies, and again extends his hand, “To reward your patience.”

Irene puts her hand in his and, with an final appreciative nod at Vanna, she follows her mark out of the lobby, into one of the corner hallways. The floor stretches out before them in diamond tiles of black and white, so polished that she can see ghostly reflections of the two of them. She turns behind her to see his soldiers following close, with Fatma right behind them, no expression on her face. She does briefly pull her brows together at her, though, as if whispering _look straight ahead._

They finally come to a flight of carpeted stairs, leading up to another hallway Irene can’t quite see. Browning stops just at the first step, and looks at her in an almost theatrically apologetic way.

“Private offices, Madam,” he tells her. “I’m afraid we must both leave our security detail here.”

Irene’s eyebrows quirk at that. She looks back at Fatma, still calm and poised, though she alone can see the subtle tightening of her lips. She feels the outline of her handgun against the inner side of her arm. “Devran, I’ll come back down in half an hour. If Daddy checks in, tell him not to worry.”

The new hallway is lit with the color of gold, and on either side is a row of ornate doors. Browning leads her up to the third on the left, then extracts an antique-looking brass key from his breast pocket. He pushes forward  –

Irene had prepared herself mentally, emotionally, for the possibility of the door opening to a lavish suite with a four-poster bed, for this towering, silver man to shove her up against a wall and force a cigar-stained kiss on her mouth. But… no. She finds them in a corporate-style office, complete with grey file cabinets lining the walls, a metal desk at the center, a tall stack of cardboard boxes to its right. A jarring set of furniture that doesn’t match well with the cream-colored walls or the faint scent of the sea wafting in from the open window.

“I am a co-owner of the club,” Browning explains. He moves past her to the window and pulls it shut. “We hold many of our sales in this corner of Istanbul; it’s very secluded, secret. I fancied it would make things neater if I were expected to come here once a month anyway.” He chuckles, which breaks Irene out of her haze of surprise. “You will forgive my conspicuous lack of sense of aesthetics.”

She puts Sofia’s smile back on when she looks at him. “A no-nonsense space for a no-nonsense man.” He gestures a hand to the chair directly in front of the desk, and she starts towards it. “It is only you who is co-owner of this establishment? What of your partners?”

“Dear Margaret is my permanent guest, I order the staff not to question her when she comes here. She’s probably off somewhere enjoying the breeze.” That is the confirmation that makes Irene’s blood rush with anticipation – so her other target is on the premises, too, and she can end this tonight.

“And your other partner, Waters?” she asks, feigning ignorance.

A wrinkle appears briefly on Browning’s nose, but it disappears as he flips on the lamp on the desk. “Away on some other business,” is all he replies. _Thanks to us,_ Irene thinks to herself.

The man takes his own seat across from Irene, and weaves his fingers together on the tabletop, the hints of his hidden smile showing again. “So. Vanna claims you have a ‘mouthwatering offer.’ How much do you aim to tempt me with?”

“’How much’ is the wrong question to ask, Mister Browning. It is simply ‘what’.” She relishes that momentary flicker of surprise on the dangerous man’s face. “I am hoping to make my payment in kind.”

With that she opens her clutch. She dips her fingers smoothly in, and pulls out a black, rectangular object.

She drops Sherlock Holmes’ MI6 mobile onto the desk. It lands with a single hard clack against the metal.

There are several seconds of silence. Browning stares at the device with a visible frown. “An iPhone 5, Madam?”

“Created by your country’s Secret Intelligence Service,” Irene says. That pulls Browning’s widened eyes back up to hers. “My father was suspected of criminal activity, so they sent one of their agents to act as a mole within his company office in Stockholm. We discovered him and… eliminated his threat. We found this on his person.”

“This…” Browning says, and she’s pleased to hear his breathlessness. He reaches a thin hand over the phone and pulls it up close to his face. “So this is how they communicate?” He sounds like he’s holding back a chuckle. “A partnership with Apple?”

“You underestimate your homeland, Mister Browning,” Irene replies, pretending to join his laughter. “It’s only made to look so innocuous. Its only function is to transfer calls between agents.” She leans forward and puts her own hands on the tabletop. “You can take it apart. Study how MI6 is able to transmit its signal without any foreign appliances picking it up. Imagine, complete access to all their future operations.”

There it is, the glitter of ambition in his shadowed eyes. He turns the mobile round in his hand once, twice more, then as Irene had anticipated but hoped against, he taps the power button and switches on the screen. She sees him frown as he reads the single contact on the list, though more from curiosity than displeasure. “Who is Irene Adler?”

“Another MI6 agent, I would guess,” she says. She feigns a giggle, partly to distract from whatever physiological reactions she might involuntarily emit at the call of her actual name, namely, the rush of blood to her face and the faint sweat at the back of her neck. “Do you suspect she’s aware her partner is dead?”

Browning gives his own gentle laugh in response, though it’s clear he’s already effectively distracted: he has eyes only for the mobile as he puts it neatly back on the desk. “What do you want in exchange – login details of a member of Parliament? A few lines of virus to nip at the ankles of the chief of security?”

“I’d like us to negotiate that matter somewhere more private,” Irene says. “You, me, and Madam Margaret Shield. My hotel just a few blocks down the road, perhaps. This club is far too crowded with gossipy socialites for my taste.”

He looks back up at her. For a stretch of silence, Irene wonders if he’s going to refuse. Then his cheeks rise in a smile, though his eyes are so narrowed she can’t quite see them. “You have such a tempting offer; it’s only fair. I’ll go and summon Margaret from the balcony, if you could give me a moment.”

Browning rises and Irene copies him, and simultaneously they reach for the MI6 mobile on the desk. They grab the opposite ends of it.

Their eyes snap up to each other’s. Browning is still smiling, though it seems to be more frozen than natural. Irene manages a smile back, though with stiffer muscles. She is reminded that, peddler of confidential information or not, this is a former lieutenant general who has killed people. “Ah, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Browning retracts his hand, which disappears behind his back. “My apologies.” He makes a small bow, then maneuvers his way around the desk, past Irene, and then she hears the old door creak open.

As soon as she hears it shut behind her, Irene whips around to the other side of the desk and bends to inspect its drawers. She pulls the center one open – empty. She pulls the three on the right, then the three on the left, and – nothing.

This desk is nothing but a lie, a stage prop. This isn’t his office.

She goes up to the row of file cabinets up against a wall – in the dimness of the evening she hadn’t given them much attention, but up close she can see that the protective plastic over the keyholes hadn’t yet been peeled off. And then the tall stack of boxes, right next to the desk. It’s just the same height as her, and she tiptoes as she lifts the lid off the top box and pulls out a ream of paper, flips through it – blank, blank, blank, white and bare and glaring under the lamp light.

This is a room for people they don’t trust.

In one swift movement, Irene opens her clutch, locates her own MI6 phone, and starts a call to Fatma Ayek. She lets it ring thrice before cancelling.

Irene hears muted footsteps and voices just outside, and she rushes to her seat and faces back to the desk, though her heart is pounding hard now against her ribcage. Her fingers are cold, almost imperceptibly shaking, and she grips her purse tighter for some stability. The gun under her arm feels hard and new again.

The door behind her creaks open, and she turns and stands up with Sofia’s smile. There at the entrance is Peter Browning again, though right in front of him is a slightly shorter, though just as aged woman, round-faced and solid-bodied, some white streaks in her wavy brown hair. She wears a midnight-blue wrap dress. Both are shadowed by the bright light in the hallway.

“You must be Margaret Shield,” Irene says, as Browning pushes the door shut behind him, “Pleasure to meet y– “

A bullet flies through the air and rips through the front of her right thigh, and Irene falls with a cry.

Hot, electric pain spreads from her leg to the rest of her body, twisting and pinching her nerves, and Irene winces as she rolls to her left side to remove pressure on her wound, and throws a hand out blindly to grasp something, to concentrate her energy on anything that isn’t searing agony, but she only finds more carpeted floor.

Her eyes are squeezed shut, and her heart is pounding wildly in her ears, but she can still hear former Lieutenant General Margaret Shield’s icy voice.

“Who is this?” she says, and Irene forces her eyes open to see a blurred image of the woman, facing Browning, but with a smoking pistol pointed back at her.

“I told you,” he snaps, and his posh accent is gone, “That’s the agent from MI6.”

“You told me your intel said that _Sherlock Holmes_ was assigned to our case. This,” she shakes her gun hard in Irene’s direction, “is not Sherlock Holmes.”

“She showed me their device,” Browning says. “She’s the one they sent.”

“What are we going to do now?” Shield snarls. “Our buyers are gathered out in the lobby and putting in bids for Sherlock fucking Holmes. A nameless MI6 agent is worth nothing.” She gives a grunt of frustration, and before Irene can process it she blinks and sees the woman marching up to her.

Shield kneels, closes her fist tight over a handful of Irene’s hair, and pulls her head up brutally – Irene gives a shout of pain. “Do you work with Holmes?”

Irene dazedly reaches up a hand to grab Shield’s wrist to try and soften the sting. It only makes her tug harder. She presses the still-hot end of her gun hard into the gash on Irene’s thigh, already stained thick with red, making her cry out again.

“ _Is he here with you now?”_ she hisses. “Is he inside the clubhouse? Speak!”

No, Irene thinks as she struggles to pull her leg away, he’s hundreds of miles away and he doesn’t know what she’s doing and he doesn’t _care._ It doesn’t matter. She just needs to find a way out of this.

“Her partner is on the ground floor,” Browning says, “Disguised as her bodyguard. A woman, also.”

“So it’s just them?” Shield says. “I’ve wasted a bullet on someone we can’t even use as bait?” She leans lower to give her a dark glare. “Well, Peter, make yourself effective for once and collect her phone from the desk.”

“And you?” he asks, though his voice is lower now, accompanied by the ominous sound of his shoes over the carpet, growing louder and closer.

“I’m going to find out if this is the same bitch who took our Terrence,” she replies, and Irene forces her eyes open to stare hard, unflinching, right into hers, no matter how much sweat has broken out on her forehead and how much the wound on her thigh still singes with pain.

Their shared gaze is broken, suddenly, when Margaret Shield’s eyes roll up into her skull, and her mouth drops open in a strangled, almost gurgling sound.

“No! “ Irene shouts reflexively, but the older woman’s grasp in her hair slackens, and she collapses in a heap right in front of her. Behind her: Peter Browning, bent on one knee, wrenching a switchblade knife out from the back of Shield’s neck, and calmly wiping it clean with a handkerchief pulled from his pocket.

“Impossible to get that woman alone in a room with me anywhere,” he says, like he’d just finished a meal or returned from a stroll. “Imagine! Not trusting your own business partners. Well, clearly it was for good reason.”

Irene looks up at him in horror, propped up on an elbow, though her arm is shaking so much it can barely support her now. For once in her life, she is utterly lost – and she is afraid of the fact.

“I may not have the man we promised our customers,” he rests a forearm on his knee, and looks at her, “But I have you, your partner, and a bar stocked full with drinks. I’ll send them home drunk and oblivious, and I will have the two of you, so I can… what was your term for it? Eliminate your threat.”

Browning rises, leaving Irene on the floor next to Margaret Shield’s corpse, and starts back towards the door. He’s going to look for Fatma, something inside Irene screams. Her immediate reaction is to try to push herself up from the ground and stop him – but her wounded leg protests by spreading through her a new wave of pain and nausea, and she falls back, breathing hard. The torn skin of her thigh and the patch of floor around her are growing wet with bright blood. She can’t use her feet, but she can use something else.

Just as Browning reaches for the doorknob, Irene pulls the handgun out from her dress and shoots him in the back.

The old man stumbles forward first with a harsh grunt. Dark red blooms from the bullet hole at the center of his back, staining his pristine tuxedo jacket. With a final surge of energy he lets out shout of anger, spilling backwards into the room. He turns to face Irene, and his eyes are wild, furious, panicked. But he can only take a few clumsy, shaking steps before he drops forward with a heavy thud. He’s dead before he hits the floor.

The gun falls from Irene’s hand. Her arm cannot take her weight any longer, collapsing beneath her. Daire is finished. The British Government’s digital secrets are safe. _It’s over,_ is the first coherent thought in her pain-addled mind.

But then, she is lying in a secret room, bleeding out, with two corpses for company. The two people she had been instructed to bring back to England alive.

 _You’ve failed,_ someone screams in her head, savage, panicked. _You’re never going home._ It was all for nothing.

She tries to get up again, but it feels as if there’s nothing making up the shape of her hands and arms save for empty air. She’s too drained, having been too distracted by everything going on to remember to apply pressure to the wound on her leg and stop up the blood. The room has grown grey and clouded.

“Adler?”

A faint call from outside, accompanied by the soft but frantic thud of approaching footsteps.

“Fatma,” Irene calls back, but her thigh throbs so intensely every second, and she has so little breath, that her already weakened voice shakes. She’d seen her missed call, then, and known there was trouble.

The sound of the footsteps increases steadily in volume as it comes up by the door – then fades away as Fatma passes her completely.

She’s going to die. The thought comes to Irene like seawater flooding a ship. She’ll slip away in this sealed room, while hundreds of club patrons and staff carry on with their evening just a floor down, and no one, not MI6 and not even Fatma, will find out what she’d been able to do.

She is so cold. Despite the heavy coat of sweat on her skin, and the rapid pulse of her heart as it rushes to replace all the blood she’s lost, her shoulders tremble against the stained carpet. Dying on the very edge of the world, and she doesn’t even have enough strength to curl her own arms around herself for comfort.

 _You’re going home,_ a new voice emerges inside her head, insistent and almost angry. _You’re going home._ The sliver of logic that’s still conscious within her knows that it’s not the truth. She’d failed her mission, and the deal is off, and her country won’t have her. But, for some reason, this voice wants her to delude herself into thinking that there is a government jet just out on the shore of the Black Sea, waiting to fly her straight back into London tonight.

With no defenses, even her own lucidity, left, she lets the thought overcome her. She imagines the sight of the blue water far down below her as the plane soars over the Channel. The bright white and yellow lines painted on the cement road, dashing past as her car rolls steadily through Belgravia, and she can even catch a glimpse of her old home, still as elegant and immaculately white as she remembers. The car doesn’t slow down, though, and continues to tear rapidly through every major road and narrow alley of the city she knows so well, past silent walking figures that she realizes own the faces of every friend she’s ever known, until everything is a blur of cobblestone and glittering light. There is a point where she races by a humble flat with a black door, a familiar number over its skewed knocker, and there is a sudden surge of longing inside her to fly up to the upper window and put her palm gently, just once, against the glass, for one last glance at whoever is waiting inside. _Please,_ she hears herself whisper, but the car she is in is already speeding off at an alarming acceleration into empty, endless space.

All of this happens in her head. But she squeezes her eyes shut for just a second, and reopens them, and she finds she still has a tenuously clear view of the thin line of light that shines out from under the closed door. There are the slow, creeping shadows of two feet, right outside the room.

Fatma? A soldier of Browning or Shield?

 _It doesn’t matter,_ the voice soothes. _You’re going home._ There is no point in taking the risk. A darkness, both suffocating and calming, begins to weigh down on her like a thick blanket.

She forces her eyes back open, though her eyelids feel heavy as stone now. This time, she glances towards her own feet, past the gory tear on her leg. There is the stack of boxes holding nothing but blank papers, just inches away.

It doesn’t matter. Or maybe it is the only thing that matters now.

With the last scrap of energy that hasn’t yet slipped from her grasp, Irene lets out a wrenching gasp as she takes her uninjured leg and kicks it, hard, against the bottom of the tower. The giant boxes come tumbling heavily, noisily down, hitting the metal desk and the carpeted floor, their contents spilling and flying through the air. White sheets float down through the dusty space, settling over the corpse of Margaret Shield, over Irene, and in the spread of blood from her leg. They soak dark, glistening red.

The shadow just outside the door stills, but Irene doesn’t see it happen. Her eyes are already closed, and she is flying over the Channel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- In case you were wondering, yes, I did indeed write this out while envisioning it with the cinematography and color grading of a Sam Mendes era Bond film.  
> \- Thank you all for your continued reading and commenting :)


	13. Disconnect

Mary is missing.

Well, “missing” would not quite be the right word. Sherlock occasionally knows where she is. The tracer planted on her little silver memory drive blips occasionally on his laptop screen in corners of Norway, Poland, Italy, more – and that’s just within twenty days. He suspects she’ll travel even farther in the coming month, and he’ll lose her signal for even longer stretches of time.

She’s too much like him. Too bent on achieving a single goal, even if it means leaving behind the ones you love to keep them safe. Even if it means handing one of them a letter powdered in a substance that causes them to pass out, when you’d thought you did everything you could to earn their complete trust (brawling with their former teammate in a stranger’s house, for example). Even if it means keeping them entirely in the dark as to what’s going on, leaving them bewildered, frustrated, lost – oh. So that’s how it feels.

Rosie lets out a long wail of distress from John’s chair, piercing the thick silence in the flat. At the same time, the blinking red locator on the world map on Sherlock’s laptop flickers erratically until it disappears entirely from the white-outlined edge of Bulgaria, and Mary is missing once more.

He pushes back from the table and walks over to the child, who is sat in the center of the great armchair, its cushion so soft she’s halfway sunken into it. “I was in the middle of something, excuse you.”

Rosie’s bottom lip quivers. She might be the most miserable infant in a bright yellow duckling-patterned footie ever. She stretches her short arms toward Sherlock, whimpering for a lift.

Her father, John Watson, is stretched on the couch, fast asleep with his cardigan thrown over his face to block the late morning light. He’s understandably exhausted, and confused, and he talks very little with Sherlock nowadays aside to ask him to help look after Rosie, or to mutter a quiet, tentative, “Where is she now?”

Sherlock had failed in protecting him, too. By losing Mary he’d left him vulnerable to doubt, to distrust, to pain. It’s one of many times he’s let his best friend down – yet here he is. The circles under his eyes considerably darker, and the shadow over his face deep and permanent, but he’s here, just as he’s been the past several days, and he even brings Rosie with him rather than leave her with a decidedly more competent babysitter. It speaks volumes, albeit in a language Sherlock doesn’t quite yet understand.

Rosie lets out a cry again, feebly closing and opening her fists. Sherlock bends down to gather her into his arms. She’s grown heavier and rounder and, well, Rosier in the last few months. He bounces her a bit. “Alright, fine, you have my full attention. What is it?”

In the past, the mere rumble of his deep speaking voice would’ve been enough to calm her down, her scrunched-up face of despair melting into one of quiet wonder. But it has no effect now. Her lips still pull downward and her eyes glisten, wet flecks of light visible on her blonde eyelashes. “Uh,” she makes a small, sad, helpless noise.

“It’s fine to miss her, you know,” says Sherlock. “You’re only human. A small, weak, defenseless one at that.”

He has to remind himself that of all the people who’ve been hit hardest by Mary’s disappearance, it must be her daughter who has it the worst. She doesn’t understand what’s going on, only that her mother hasn’t held her for days and days. It’s difficult to mimic the intimate warmth that Mary’s embrace probably feels like to her. John’s probably comes the closest, but Sherlock doesn’t want to wake him up from what seems to be his first proper nap in weeks.

“Uh,” Rosie cries again. She paws ineffectually at the lapels of his dressing gown.

“Yes, I miss her too,” Sherlock tells her. “Crying won’t bring her back. But based on your brief history you prefer to follow impulse over logic. Very Watson of you.”

She looks up at him, her mouth opening and closing as if preparing for an even bigger, longer cry. Sherlock carries her over to his desk.

“Here, to distract you. I stole this from my brother’s house.” He gently lifts his laptop off the dusty, emerald-green album it had been sitting on top of, and flips it open to a page in the middle. There are four aged photographs underneath the plastic film, the black spaces long faded purple and the details gone soft and blurred. But the child captured in all of them has that same curly hair and unmistakable blue eyes.

“This one,” he pokes a finger at the first picture on the right, “Is me on my twelfth birthday. If you followed my advice more thoroughly I guarantee you’ll live past that age.”

Young Sherlock is smack in the center of the photo, sitting behind a floral tablecloth and in front of yellow striped wallpaper. On top of the table is a big chocolate cake, two candles shaped like a 1 and a 2 sitting on top, their flames already blown out. Surrounding it are four little plates partnered with their own little forks. Sherlock himself is already a pale and gangly thing, his growth spurt clumsily taking effect, and he eyes the photographer with a bright-eyed curiosity. He’s smiling.

“John gets a kick out of seeing evidence that I wasn’t grown in a lab.” Sherlock shrugs. “I reckoned you’d be the same.”

Rosie doesn’t seem like she’s about to burst to tears anymore; perhaps his continued speaking has calmed her down. But she doesn’t seem to have much interest in his childhood photographs.

“I swear, it’s me. Look,” Sherlock says, and peels back the plastic to take the photo from the page. He lifts it up near enough for her to gently grab at.

He’d forgotten he was there in the picture, too, but now with a closer view Sherlock can see his brother Mycroft at the far left, a third of him cut off by the white border. He leans back against the striped wall, arms folded, every inch of him brooding teenager. Still heavyset, though when paired with an impressive increase in height it makes him look strong instead of small and soft.

It’s odd to see him so young, Sherlock thinks. He forgets there was a time that his brother was not as intelligent or cynical as he is now. Or maybe, judging by the crease of his brows and the bow of his head in this photograph, he had already grown up weary and disappointed in this world that had promised him so much and given so little.

 There’s a click and a creak behind him, and Sherlock turns, Rosie still in one arm, to see Mrs. Hudson slipping into the sitting room, holding a newspaper. “Bringing you the paper!” she says, attempting brightness. “Need a hand?”

“Preferably not from you,” he says, though not unkindly, “You look as if you haven’t slept a week.”

“Deptford, dear,” she waves the newspaper before dropping it to the low table by Sherlock’s couch with a loud, papery thump. John doesn’t even move. “Bloody Deptford.”

“What about Deptford?” Sherlock asks and, despite his earlier refusal, transfers Rosie gently into Mrs. Hudson’s arms. Rosie doesn’t protest; she seems to like her well enough. At the same time, a beep sounds from his laptop – he turns his head to see that the red arrow denoting Mary’s present location has flashed back into view on the grid map, back along the coastline of Bulgaria.

“They’re demolishing buildings left and right,” Mrs. Hudson laments, though Sherlock has already moved around the table to lean over and watch his screen. “Cranes just rolling around everywhere. It’s loud and awful all the time. I can’t walk to the street market without jumping ten feet in the air.”

“Then find another street market,” Sherlock says distractedly, clicking to zoom in closer on the locator. It moves very gradually down the shoreline of the Black Sea, but starts to flicker. His heart sinks.

“There’s no market better than Deptford’s,” she retorts, sounding insulted by the idea. “Plus a man there sells my hair color.”

He taps the Up key insistently to keep up with its route, but the red arrow lags behind for a few seconds before disappearing entirely from the map. “Then brave the demolitions and keep visiting the market like a true soldier.” His whole screen actually flickers to black, then after a second comes back to life. “For god’s sake.”

“Sherlock,” whispers Mrs. Hudson. Rosie makes a sound of discomfort. The entirety of his screen freezes up, and then suddenly the outlines of the countries are gone, too. Sherlock’s heart is beating out of his ears. Has he lost the signal for good?

“Sherlock,” Mrs. Hudson says again in that hushed tone, but he’s scrolling madly up and down the grid, seeking out remnants of the map that haven’t blinked out of existence.

“I gave you my empty words of encouragement,” he says, waving a hand. “Just bloody follow them!”

“Sherlock!” she snaps. “Rosie’s crying.”

That’s what tears his eyes from the screen. He looks up to see Mrs. Hudson’s face, wide-eyed and concerned, one of her hands patting the back of a keening Rosie, pearly tears streaming down her cheeks.

Sherlock is stunned. “What did you do?”

“What did _I_ do,” Mrs. Hudson says incredulously. Rosie whimpers and hides her face against the landlady’s purple sleeve. “You were raising your voice! I was only trying to calm you down.”

The thing that used to bring her peace has brought her to tears. Sherlock straightens and stares. Mrs. Hudson continues to gently bounce the child, making soothing clucking noises. She starts to turn away, taking a step toward the couch.

“Give her to me,” Sherlock says, reaching forward. “Don’t disturb John. I’ll take care of it.”

Mrs. Hudson gives him a sad look, but she doesn’t hesitate to turn and carefully transfer Rosie back into his arms. She’s still breathing hard, her exhales coming out broken, and her face is a wet mess. There are dark tearstains on her fuzzy yellow footie. Has he failed in protecting her, too? His body goes cold at the thought.

“Need me to stay and clean up?” Hudson offers, sounding much gentler.

Sherlock rocks Rosie gently, though his eyes are back on his laptop screen. The map and locator are still gone, just a big, empty window on his desktop remains. “No,” he says. “Thank you.”

He hears her sigh, her feet plodding over the carpet towards the door. “I need a vacation.”

The door shuts behind her, and Sherlock rubs his hand on Rosie’s back for a minute more until she’s calm and droopy-eyed, and he sets her gently down into his chair – no, she kicks and mewls in protest – fine, John’s chair a few more feet away. He pulls and tucks its ever-present gingham blanket over her bottom half. “Sorry,” he tells her, but she’s already distractedly staring at the pattern, nose and eyes still shining wet, though at least she’s not wailing anymore.

With that settled, Sherlock strides back to his desk, picks up his mobile, and fires off a message to his brother. _Tracer’s not working. Find out what’s wrong._

Five minutes, six, seven, and no reply comes. Either he’s busy (likely) or he’s deliberately being difficult (more likely). He starts a call.

The ring goes on, but no one picks up, so it ends automatically. Sherlock lets out a sharp huff of air and tries again.

Fifteen rings later, Mycroft finally picks up. “Yes, hello,” he says, and his voice is hoarse, like he’d been working all throughout the previous night. He speaks low enough that Sherlock can’t even determine the size of the room he’s in, and therefore can’t tell where he is.

Sherlock doesn’t bother to greet him back. “Your tracer’s malfunctioning.”

“I told you,” says Mycroft, and he can imagine him dragging his hand down his face. “The signal is usually twenty-four hours delayed. That device was designed for targets who stay put for days at a time. Mary Watson never stops moving.”

“It’s not just that.” Sherlock pinches the bridge of his nose. “The location’s gone. The map’s gone. The program itself isn’t working.”

“That will happen, too,” Mycroft replies in the most infuriatingly dismissive tone. “It’s primitive technology, but it was the best I could get to you on such short notice.”

“You insult me,” Sherlock snarls, whipping back to face his desk. “’Primitive’? I’ve seen what MI6 is capable of.” His head almost aches from all his frustration. All this information, all this technology withheld, when just months before the Secret Intelligence Service had been kissing his feet.

“It’s not MI6’s device,” Mycroft sighs, “As if they’d ever allow a civil servant use of their satellites. It’s simply something from my own department. Sherlock… I told you. Ever since we pulled you out, they’ve only thrown me table scraps.”

He sounds as if he’s struggling not to be cross with him. Or, possibly, he has no energy left to _be_ cross. But Sherlock pushes on, adamant. “Except for their precious phone that they lent me, correct? Well, have you told them where I’ve left it yet? Or do they still plan to break your fingers?”

Mycroft doesn’t answer immediately. There’s a faint buzz of static underneath the silence. Sherlock’s hand rests at the edge of the desk, drumming against the wood.

“They don’t know where it is, Sherlock,” he says quietly.

“What,” he says, voice still rough with anger. He prompts for an explanation, even as his hand presses harder against the table, as he fights the dread from sinking in, “What does that mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.”

“I. Don’t,” Sherlock says through gritted teeth. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” His hand on the desk curls into a fist and he bangs it against the tabletop. All the items sitting on it clatter. “I told you whom I’d left it with. What more do they need?”

“Her. They need her, Sherlock,” Mycroft answers, and it echoes faintly as if he’s leaned his face close against a wall. “I told them what you’d told me, and they reached out to her for updates.” He takes a small breath. “She hasn’t responded in two weeks.”

The sun out the window has reached noon position, flooding 221B with a hot, blinding light, but its rays don’t touch Sherlock, who leans against the end of his desk, centered in the shadow. He’s cold suddenly, like all the blood has drained from his veins.

“So what,” he says, between breaths that have grown heavy, “They’re MI6’s phones, they can trace their locations. Why should it matter she hasn’t said anything.”

“They’ve not received a signal from her device nor yours.” Mycroft draws in another breath, like the next piece of information is a weight he’s been carrying on his back. “That typically means they’ve been physically destroyed.”

Something curdles and rises inside Sherlock, almost so that he feels dizzy and viscerally nauseated. “Shouldn’t they do something, then,” he asks, “Send an agent out to find her, uncover what could have happened – “

“I _asked_.” The statement itself, along with all the information, and sentiment, it implies, feels like a heavy mass pushing down on both of them. Sherlock thinks his spine might snap from the weight. “There is no rescue protocol. They’re abandoning the mission.”

“They can’t just – “ Sherlock starts, but his voice dies abruptly, like a wire in his system had been cut. This has happened many times before. It’s as if whenever he feels anything too intensely, his mind rushes to shut off all the parts of his body that could be used to demonstrate emotional response. _Don’t dare show how weak you are_ , it seems to warn him. A survival mechanism.

“They can’t let Irene Adler form a trail leading back to their headquarters,” Mycroft tries to explain. “It’s too dangerous.”

Hearing her name, after refusing to say it, even think it, for months, is like a blow to Sherlock’s centre. It’s sudden, excruciating, and completely unwanted. He shuts his eyes from the impact – and realizes almost immediately what a critical error he’d made. Her face, bare and moonlit like the last time he’d seen her before closing a door behind him, begins to take form in the blackness, and he has to shake the image away. But it only ushers forth more nightmarish things – her, locked away in a dark room by her captors, or her, fleeing for her life farther into Asia, without a single resource or contact or scrap of food left, or her, flat on the floor, a clean bullet hole at the center of her head –

“I’ll be looking into it myself,” says Mycroft. Sherlock can’t tell if it’s honesty, or the typical empty promises an older sibling might desperately shower on his baby brother when he looks as if he’s about to cry. “There’s little I can do. But I _will_ attempt to do it.”

Sherlock abruptly tears his mobile from his ear and ends the call. He won’t hear these words, not from the man whose deal lured Irene to this assignment in the first place. He almost wants to crush his phone within his fist, just to have control over something, just to be able to _do_ something. Almost he can see the glass shattering and piercing into his palm, blood dripping between his knuckles, and the violent image is magnificently distracting. But he can’t – his body has locked up, and he can only stare at the screen until it fades to black.

“Gonna phone a friend?” says a soft voice from in front of him. It’s low and soothing, threatening to numb him completely, too much like a drug.

Sherlock lets out a shaky sigh, briefly closes his eyes. Not this. Anything but this.

“You’re only supposed to show up when you’re a distraction,” he says. Responding to it is already losing, but it seems he no longer has an option other than that.

He looks up, and feels the breath catch in his throat: Irene Adler stands in front of him, her hair clean and let down, wearing her t-shirt and denim from Montenegro. The burning noon sun is gone from the room – he’s bewildered to find 221B thrown into a cold blue night. John isn’t napping on the couch; Rosie isn’t crying in the armchair.

She gives him a devastating smile. “Makes things complicated, doesn’t it, that the thing you need distraction from is _me._ ”

“Are you dead?”

She tilts her head in a manner too much resembling his, the moonlight shining against her cheek. He hates the spectres that his mind conjures; there is only so much of a real person he can recreate, before he’s forced to inadequately fill in all the gaps. “Does it matter?” she asks.

The phone is Sherlock’s hand lights up. Mycroft is trying to call him up again. He places it on the desk, face down, pressing it a little too hard to the wood. “You wouldn’t need to be here now if it didn’t,” he says through gritted teeth. His mind is trying to tell him something, he knows it. The shadowy image of her is standing here because it will help him to accomplish something, but he sifts through all the data he has on her mission and finds nothing of value. Just useless numbers and dates and the faces of the three lieutenant generals, now grown hateful and distorted – _they’re_ the ones who aimed to destroy her. They’re the ones at fault.

“Why does need have to figure into it?” the spectre asks, echoing something Irene had said to him long before. She reaches a hand and puts it gently over his on the tabletop.

It feels like her. Gentle yet solid, the bones in her palm sliding over his knuckles. The room is dim and still, and she’s the only one here with him, and had this happened any other time, before Montenegro, before even this mission, it would have been so easy to lose himself in this.

But now? Her touch is like fire, and Sherlock wrenches his hand away in revulsion. He lets out a sound of rage, instinctively taking the open photo album on the table and shoving it at her, but Irene is already gone. The day, bright and inescapable, has come flooding back into the sitting room. John is still lying across his couch, not at all disturbed by the chaotic crash of a heavy book onto the floor. Old photographs are still flying and floating through the air, and they catch piercing flickers of sunlight on their journey downward. Rosie, from John’s armchair, lets out a quiet, peaceful breath, fast asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the last we'll see of Mrs. Hudson! I didn't mean for that to sound so menacing.
> 
> I am so excited for the next chapter; I've had it planned for maybe a year now :) Again, thank you everyone for reading!


	14. Dark Matter

_Days Earlier_

Irene Adler wakes up with the sun on her face.

It’s jarring, especially when her last vivid memory was of a slit of light shining through a closed door, and how cold she was as she lay dying in a pool of her own blood. And after that, she had felt nothing but the vague sensation of falling slowly through air, everything around her black and empty. It was the quietest place she had ever known.

So when she feels the heat on her skin, she almost winces from the pain. The muscles around her mouth pull, and suddenly she can feel her face again. The day is so bright it passes through her eyelids and stains her vision red. Another sense regained. Everything else floods back rapidly right after: the smell of a clean room, the taste of intense hunger on her tongue, the magnified echo of her one ear pressed into the pillow. It feels far too uncomfortable to be death. So, she assumes she is alive.

 _How._ naturally, is the first question her mind fires out. But it’s drowned out by all the complaints her senses are transmitting after spending so long in the numbing dark. The bedsheet is pulled too tightly over her waist and legs. The sun is still in her eyes. She is so, so hungry. Her right arm aches from being stretched over her head. What?

Irene’s eyes finally fly open. As she’d expected, she is lying with her head turned towards a brightly lit window on a plain white wall. Half her sight is obstructed by the blur that is her raised arm. She frowns groggily and tries to pull it down to her side, but the feel of smooth steel clacks against her wrist.

The sensation hurls Irene straight out of her daze and into a state of alarm. She quickly tilts her head up and sees it: she is handcuffed to a rail on the headboard.

She props herself up on the elbow of her free arm, breathing hard. She’s in a blue twin bed in what looks like a moderately-priced motel room – clean walls, carpeted floors, a television set on top of the dresser. To her left is a second bed, unmade, and the door to the loo. To her right, the window and the door leading out, tightly shut.

Irene looks down at herself. She’s wearing a large, loose gray shirt that she doesn’t recognize, and nothing else. Where are her old clothes, her shoes? She takes a hold of the blanket and yanks it hard from her legs – her injured thigh is wrapped in a clean white bandage without a bloodstain in sight. Newly redressed, not more than a few hours ago.

She looks again at her handcuffed wrist. There’s something sticking to the back of her hand, and she turns it just so to see a square plaster with a small hole punctured in it near her knuckles. She flexes her fingers and gasps at the tenderness – there was an IV in her at one point. Likely for an emergency blood transfusion.

Her head swims. Someone had found her and tended to her injuries, but didn’t trust her to stay put, hence the handcuffs. _Someone carried my body out of the clubhouse and changed my clothes,_ she thinks to herself, heart pounding. This person cared enough to do difficult and physically intimate things to get her to safety.

Who could it have been? Fatma? Someone from MI6?

…or… no…

She stretches her free hand towards the bedside dresser and pulls open the top drawer, pushing away a blank notepad, a little calendar (written in Turkish, so she must still be in the country), and locates what she was searching for: a long, sharpened pencil. She can hide it with her under the blanket and pretend to be asleep whenever her rescuer (captor?) returns, then when they lean over to check on her, she can pull it out and stab them in the neck. It’s not much, but it’s the best she can do while bound to a bed.

Just as she thinks this, the motel door creaks open. Irene’s fingers tighten on the pencil as she looks up at the figure who pushes their way in, turned away and obscured by a thick red coat, swearing under their breath as they lug in two large paper bags. She sees a flash of dark brown hair.

“Who are you?” Irene rasps, her throat burning after what’s probably been days of disuse.

The figure jumps and turns around to face her, and she sees that it’s a middle-aged woman, Caucasian, medium height, large eyes. She quickly shoves one paper bag into her other arm and holds up a hand. “Easy, now.”

“Don’t come near me til you’ve answered.”

“Fine, fine.” She has a deep voice. British accent. Irene’s pulse jumps. The woman reaches up with her free hand and pulls her brunette wig off her head – revealing blonde curls.

“My name is Mary Watson,” she says.

Something swoops through Irene, much like the panic the body broadcasts when one is falling. “Watson,” she repeats, feeling chilled. “…You’re – _John_ Watson’s – sister? Wife?”

“Wife,” Mary replies, though the word is short and soft like an exhale of air, and almost sounds sad. She tosses the wig onto the table with the TV, then shrugs the paper bags back into a more secure hold, pushes the door closed with her hip, and makes her way towards Irene.

Instinctively she takes a hard grip of the pencil and raises it out of the drawer. “Why have you handcuffed me?”

Mary looks her up and down. “Same reason you’re trying to make a weapon out of that pencil.” She takes the chair from the corner desk and carries it with her to Irene’s bedside. “Don’t you worry, now that I’m here I’ll take them off you. Hard to have lunch with only one hand, I imagine.”

The scent wafting from her paper bags reaches Irene even before the word “lunch” does. It smells like a hot, hearty meal bought possibly from a take-out place just out on the street. She feels her stomach growl, but she resists leaning towards it.

Mary, still eyeing her, eases into the chair and pulls out two transparent plastic containers of pilav üstü doner, slices of beef and vegetables over pilaf rice. She sets them on the dresser while pulling a steel key out from her coat pocket, and reaching to release Irene from the headboard.

Soon as her hand is freed she pulls it onto her lap. She doesn’t say thank you. Instead she watches Mary Watson place one meal on the bed next to her, and gets immediately to lifting the lid off her own. On top of the food are a pair of plastic utensils, and the smell of meat is intoxicating.

“We’ll have to share a tumbler, I’m afraid,” Mary says casually. She pulls out a silver cylinder, the sound of liquid sloshing inside, and sets that on the dresser, too. “Well. Go ahead. You’ve not eaten anything in three days, you must be famished.”

“How did you find me?” Irene asks, still not touching her meal.

Mary sighs through her mouthful of pilaf. This question was to be expected, of course, but couldn’t she just finish her delicious food first, her expression reads. “Working for the CIA for a few years gets you your own resources. You understand I can’t be more specific,” she answers after swallowing. She wags a fork at Irene. “You’ve shown up on their radar once or twice, did you know. You’re quite the celebrity. You had on a false nose that first time, I think, so I didn’t recognize you.”

“You traced me to Turkey,” Irene says between uneasy breaths, “And just – packed up your things and came here? To come help me?”

“Oh, don’t be so flattered.” Mary waves a hand. “I’ve got loads of unfinished business in Istanbul, fortunately for you. I’ll be able to see you through a week or two of P.T., just til you’re comfortable walking again on that leg. Speaking of which – “ she pauses to eat another mouthful, “ – You’re real bloody lucky, you know that? Whoever shot you got you through the front of your thigh and not the back. They could have hit your femoral artery and you would’ve died in minutes.”

“’Lucky’?” Irene scoffs, “I nearly bled to death.” She pushes back the blanket to bring her bandaged thigh into view, and stares at the IV bandage on her hand. “How were you even prepared to treat – “

“Red Cross a block down.” Mary tilts her head in the general direction of it. “The security around their blood bank isn’t terribly tight. And I got a peek at your file when you were first assigned to this mission, so I knew your blood type. Thought you ought to know I didn’t accidentally poison you, nor do I plan to. Seriously, eat your lunch.”

“But – Fatma,” Irene blurts, “My… my teammate. She was searching for me – “

“I saw her flee the premises,” explains Mary, “Didn’t see anyone follow her, so I think she’s safe. Can’t say for sure. Oh, she did try to call you once or twice. I presumed you wouldn’t want me to answer for you.”

“Call me?” Irene sits up and strains to look around the room. “My mobile – mobiles – from MI6. Where did you…”

“The two in the room with you?” Mary says. “I’m sorry. I destroyed them both. There’s something I’ve got to do, and I can’t have the government – _any_ government – track where I’m going. You know the feeling, I’m sure.”

Irene is speechless for several seconds. She still doesn’t touch her container of food, as Mary busies herself with hiding her handcuffs back into a backpack she’d apparently been keeping underneath Irene’s bed. This isn’t real. It can’t be.

“All this work,” Irene breathes. “All these resources. And you don’t even look as if you’ve broken a sweat. How on earth did you…”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. We share practically the same skillset,” Mary says. Now her tone is straightforward and a little more serious, and she looks Irene square in the eye. “With one vital difference: You run to hide. I run to chase.”

She explains no further than that, and bends back down to arrange some things inside the bag. With that one statement Irene feels as if she sees Mary Watson now with a better pair of glasses: the squared and sturdy posture of a fighter, and more noticeably the suggestion of the outline of a gun in her coat pocket. She watches her zip her backpack closed and shove it back under the bed.

“Did Sherlock send you?”

Mary straightens and looks at her with a new expression. She’s not exactly smiling, though her brows are raised in interest. She looks her up and down. “Would you be disappointed if I said he hadn’t?”

Irene holds her gaze. “I just can’t think of any other reason you’d bother to help me.”

The corners of Mary’s lips briefly quirk downwards. _Touché,_ she seems to say. She puts aside her finished meal. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

Irene is hit with a pang of irritation. “What does that even mean,” she snaps, gripping the edge of the bed to demand Mary’s attention, “What could you possibly gain from – “ She gives a grunt of agony – leaning onto her side applied sudden pressure on her injured leg, and all her nerves sear in protest.

“Easy, easy.” Mary is suddenly standing over her, pushing at her shoulders to lie her back against the pillow. She puts a gentle hand under Irene’s thigh, which pulses unbearably, and turns and lays it down against the mattress. She keeps her palm over Irene’s bandage until she’s stopped wincing blindly from the pain.

Several moments later, Irene’s breathing slows. Her head rests limply on the pillow, and when she forces her eyes open she’s irritated at herself for the single tears that spring from their edges and roll down the side of her face. Mary says nothing and sits back down, but Irene can sense her eyes on her, even while she stares upward at the stained white ceiling. The sun still shines against the side of her face, but she barely feels it anymore.

“Irene,” Mary finally says after a stretch of silence. “What happened in the clubhouse?”

She gives a tired, humorless laugh. “Surely you gathered enough when you saw me bleeding out next to two dead bodies.”

“The objective was to bring the three back to England alive,” Mary recounts, “What went wrong?”

Irene closes her eyes again. She sees the fake office with its empty cabinets, blank papers. She sees the dark shore of the Black Sea out the single window.

“They knew I was coming,” Irene says quietly, though the edges of her voice are sharp. “No, well, they knew MI6 was coming.” She laughs again, and it stings in her throat. “Did you know. They thought it was going to be Sherlock." She draws in a heavy breath that hurts. "They _wanted_ it to be, so they could kidnap him and auction him off.” She opens her eyes; the stains on the ceiling are blurred now, and she blinks hard. The colors shift and never quite go still. “It was a mistake to take on this assignment. I was never needed.”

Mary doesn’t respond. Irene reaches up a hand and drags it heavily down her face, stopping at her mouth. Regret is not an emotion she ever lingers on. But now she wishes nothing more than to turn back time, to before the evening in the clubhouse, to before she’d ever learned of this mission. It would take away her resumed contact with Sherlock, and that one surreal night in Montenegro… but perhaps it would have been better that way. Back then, at least, when looking off into her uncertain future it only seemed like an endless road leading somewhere she couldn’t see. Now she’s standing at a cliff, with nothing before her but a straight drop into a black abyss.

And him. He might have been happier thinking they had said their goodbyes in Karachi, their paths never to cross again. She wonders if he would have continued to miss her, or just never think of her after that. Perhaps it would have been better to disappear.

“I don’t believe in mistakes,” Mary says, breaking Irene out of her trance. She turns her head, and finds the blonde woman already looking back at her, calm. “Just... detours. Trust me, I’m taking one right now.” She shrugs as she picks up the emptied paper bags and folds them flat. “More than one, to be honest. A detour within a detour.”

Mary chuckles to herself at that, then stands up to dispose the paper bags properly into a plastic bin by the television set. When she comes back to her chair, there’s something like satisfaction in her eyes. “Sounds as if the lieutenant generals’ information was just outdated. They learned Sherlock Holmes was MI6’s man for the job, then stopped digging then and there. None of them expected an Irene Adler to step in and shake things up.” She gives Irene a surprisingly relaxed grin. “You could even say that, by taking on this assignment, you more or less saved Sherlock’s life.”

Irene scoffs. “I’m sure he’s _enormously_ grateful.”

That, at least, seems to make Mary drop her smile. Irene turns her head to the window. The light from outside is still blinding white, but there’s something cathartic about forcing herself to stare into it. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she'd had nearly died at night, when she thought she'd never see the sun again. She quietly composes a mental note:  _make sure that next time you die during a sunset._

“Where are you headed for after Istanbul?” Irene asks after a while, voice low. It’s a feeble attempt at changing the subject, but she is genuinely curious.

“Dunno yet,” Mary replies, simply. “I’ll decide when you’re all healed up.” The sound of the chair shifting closer. “And you? Where do you plan to go?”

She has no choice but to be honest. “I don’t know.”

“You won’t try and go home?”

Something in Irene’s chest aches. She rests a hand over it like it might lessen the pain. “I’m quite sure I’ve ruined my last chance.” She screws her eyes shut, though of course her vision glows red from the light. A deep breath, and then another. You never realize just how widely your rib cage expands when you inhale. “I never thanked you, Mary Watson. For saving my life.”

“You knocked over those boxes to cause a racket,” she hears Mary say to her. “You saved your own.” Irene doesn’t see it, but she feels a brush of warmth near her side, as if Mary’s laid a hand next to her on the bed. “You should give yourself credit for making the decision to stay alive. I know how difficult that can be in our line of work.”

Irene squeezes her eyelids together in a vain attempt to block out the light. “No. I think the difficult part’s just begun.” She has nowhere to go, and no one to be. After the end of the world, what’s left in its wake?

“You don’t have to face it alone,” says Mary. Her hand wavers at Irene’s side. “England might not be waiting for you. But someone else is.”

That’s when Irene turns her head back to her, eyes open and wide. Angry, almost. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Mary’s brows pull together. “Is it so hard to believe he worries for you?”

The question hurts like an old bruise that’s been prodded. “You said it yourself,” Irene says, bitterly. “He doesn’t know you’re here. I wonder why that is?”

Mary’s eyes harden. She has that razor-sharp look again, the look of a woman who runs to chase. She leans closer. “No one knows I’m here but you and me. Not Sherlock, not my husband, and not my daughter. I’m not obligated to tell you the reason why.” She takes a firm hold of Irene’s forearm now, and the gaze they share is intense. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I chose to come here and help you.”

Irene doesn’t say anything in response, but she doesn’t tear her eyes away. She keeps her own face cold, challenging, though she wonders if Mary can feel her rapid pulse in her wrist.

“Sherlock is my friend,” Mary says. Her voice is quieter now, but she doesn’t let Irene go. “I try to protect him the way he tries to protect me. I watch over him, a lot. So believe me when I say this: it would kill him if something were to happen to you.” She bites her lip, and nods slowly. “It would absolutely kill him.”

Irene still doesn’t reply. She keeps her lips pressed tight together. But she’s breathing hard through her nose, like something has built up in her chest and is screaming to be let out. It could be a sob, or a scream. She doesn’t want to find out.

She doesn’t want to believe what Mary Watson is telling her; it doesn’t make sense. Sherlock Holmes had saved her once, yes, but back then he had saved the woman who outwitted and challenged him, who provided him a welcome distraction. Now, after all they’ve been through, she’s the woman who had used him and thrown him away. It’s not the same.

“So,” she manages after what feels like a minute, though her voice comes out in a rasp like she hasn’t spoken in days, “Was this your plan all along?”

Mary finally lets go. “I’m not gonna tie you in a bow and toss you into his arms.” She pauses over Irene, then shrugs and gestures at the bandage wrapped cleanly around Irene’s leg. “Well. I’m not gonna toss you into his arms.” She eases back into the chair. “All I set out to do was make sure you’re safe. And now you are. Everything after this is up to you.”

Irene feels dazed. She can’t tell if it’s from heat or hunger. “I don’t – “ she suddenly can’t remember what she’d planned to say. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“I know what you mean.” It’s not the response Irene expected; she’d steeled herself for more argument. But Mary is bent forward with her elbows on her knees, the look in her eyes much softer now. “People like us, we don’t always deserve the love we’re given. But we’re allowed to be greedy.”

She lets that sink in the air between them. It gives Irene a chance to study her face, and see everything that makes Mary Watson what she is: the wrinkles of someone who’s lived a secret life, lips whose favorite sound to make is her spouse’s name, the dark under-eye circles of a new and terrified mother.

After a while, Mary blinks, then gives a long sigh as she moves to stand up. “I’ve got to buy some supplies. Be back in an hour. You should really eat your food.”

The sight of her turning to leave seizes Irene like a visceral panic attack. Without thinking she shoots her hand out and grabs Mary by the wrist.

“Wait,” she says, suddenly out of breath. Her heart beats loud in her ears. “Stay. Please.”

Mary looks back to stare at her. Her lips move like she might say something, but no words make it out. Irene feels completely frozen, unable to let go nor pull her closer.

It takes a moment, but another exhale escapes from Mary, and she seems to wilt subtly under Irene’s grasp. She sinks back into the motel chair, her eyes downcast, though she moves her hand so that she links their fingers together. The silence around them rings and rings.

Neither of them says anything for a long time after that, as if this moment were a secret kept even from themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- When I first outlined this chapter around a year ago, I'd intended it to be the kick-ass interaction I speculated a first meeting between Irene and Mary would be like, as well as a showcase of just how capable Mary is. Now, after S4's come out, this chapter's revision turned it into something almost like a requiem. It makes me sad to reread it now. Here's to Mary. <3  
> \- My IRL friend read the early draft of this chapter and accused me of enjoying giving Irene Adler leg injuries and/or making Sherlock very, very sad. Sorry!  
> \- ...Confession time. You've all caught up with me progress-wise. Which means the next chapters, though definitely extant, are not quite ready yet to be published. So, as much as it pains me to do this, I'll have to ask for some time to complete writing them, which I estimate will take me about 2-3 weeks. My goal is to finish the last 6 chapters 100% so that I might be able to update twice a week once I come back since they're all very closely tied together. I'm so sorry to make you guys wait like this! But I truly do appreciate all my kind and generous readers, kudos-ers and reviewers <3 I mean it when I say our conversations in the comments section are one of the highlights of my week.  
> \- A hint for next chapter, which I hope I finish ASAP: "Home." See you all very soon!


	15. Entropy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good golly! I'd like to thank everyone for their patience - that hiatus took longer than expected. Sorry! Hopefully the upcoming turn of events will make up for it :) Enjoy!

There is a strange and hazy childhood memory that Sherlock comes back to every now and then. He is very small and playing in the vast green field out in front of his parents’ country home one hot day, equipped with a large and heavy magnifying glass stolen from his mother’s study. He holds it over a dry yellow leaf about the size of his palm. He raises the glass till the sunlight passing through shrinks to no bigger than a pinpoint, until smoke begins to rise and curl out from the quickly blackening spot.

“Mycroft,” he calls out, “What’s happening?”

His older brother’s tall shadow comes up next to his over the grass. “You’re burning a part of it. Don’t worry, it’s still a leaf.”

Sherlock keeps the glass held high, till about half of the blade has been burned away. “Is it still a leaf now?”

“Yes.”

He moves the pinprick of sun over the top of the leaf then moves it down its length, and after a while only a bottom quarter and the short stalk remain. “Is it still a leaf?”

“Yes.”

Sherlock burns out what little is left, until there are only flecks of black fluttering on the soil, while all the smoke quickly vanishes. “Now there isn’t any leaf,” Mycroft tells him.

“Where’s it gone?”

“Here,” Mycroft points a finger at Sherlock’s forehead. “If you keep it recorded somewhere, we’ll always know what it used to be.”

He’ll only learn much later that his brother was teaching him then about chemical changes, and even a bit about how scientists should note down all their observations during an experiment. In that moment itself, however, he’s simply fascinated by the fact that the leaf could be called a leaf up until the very last of it had burned away.

He thinks of it now, as he, John, and Mary sit in a plane flying them away from the heart of the Middle East. It had taken some weeks, but they’d finally caught up to her in Tehran. He’s going home now furnished with an alarming amount of information about her past and a possible mole within the British Government, but the important thing is that she’s returning where she belongs: her present family.

Sherlock wonders, as he leans back in his seat a few rows behind her, if there’s any bit of Rosamund left in the woman he knows and loves as Mary. Does Rosamund have living relatives, old lovers, a childhood home still standing somewhere in Europe? Or has all that physical evidence been erased, existing now only in a record in her mind?

All throughout their journey home he’s caught her glancing at him in quiet moments, and she draws her brows together and tightens her lips as if there’s something she’s aching to tell him. But, understandably, she has more to discuss with her husband. She and John occasionally bend their heads toward each other to murmur in hushed voices. He even catches John smiling once or twice.

He thinks again of that little leaf in the yard, how under the hot glow of the sun it had looked almost golden. He almost feels guilty for burning it.

* * *

_Weeks Earlier_

Sherlock’s hands don’t shake as he zips his duffel bag closed. The world map on his laptop screen is still frozen blank, with no sign of Mary’s little red arrow returning, though now a window for an airline website is pulled up to obscure half of it.

There is a confirmation for a booking of a flight to Turkey. He’ll be there before the sun sets.

He doesn’t know what waits for him when his plane lands in Istanbul. Perhaps Irene is alright after all, having deliberately cut her communication with MI6 after deciding she doesn’t need their help to find her way back home. Or maybe he’ll only be picking up the shattered pieces of a failed mission. Both would be undesirable revelations, but here he is packing a bag.

Irene’s spectre still flickers in his vision, the same way a moving mirror or glass occasionally catches the sun and gives off a blinding white flash of light. No matter how hard he blinks, she comes back: She’s standing by his desk, and he can almost sense the turn of her head and the creep of her eyes as they follow him around the room, but he won’t dare look at her face. It’s a distraction, only a distraction.

He lifts his bag off his chair and pulls the strap over his shoulder, sweeping past the childhood photographs still scattered on the carpet, heedless of the crumpling sounds they make as his shoes land over them. His coat and scarf, the last things he needs, hang by the door.

He stops halfway across the sitting room when he catches sight again of John, still napping on his couch. In his uncomfortable sleep he’s turned so that he lies on his side, facing away from Sherlock, the rise and fall of his shoulder slow but steady.

Sherlock wonders what he could possible leave as a note for when John wakes up. _I’ll be back in a week?_ He has no guess of when he’ll return from Istanbul. _Watch the map?_ His friend can barely function. How could Sherlock possibly explain to him that he’s temporarily abandoning their mission of locating his wife to chase down a ghost?

His shoulder strains with fresh pain under the weight of the strap of his bag. The coat and scarf by the door suddenly feel a little farther away.

He hears a little voice from behind, and he turns to see Rosie in John’s armchair, newly awake and looking at him. She’s nearly swallowed in the gingham blanket, but the arm and two legs she has buried under it kick and squirm with nervous energy.

She reaches towards him with a curious noise, then tries to heave her entire body forward, as if asking if she can follow. She lands on her belly then tries to roll off the seat of the chair.

Without delay Sherlock drops his bag and launches forward, catching her under her side before she can fall. He quickly sets her upright and leans her back again in the chair, and sheaths her again in the protective warmth of the blanket. “Ah,” she says, satisfied, as if he’d done the work for her.

Something sinks inside him, wondering what would have happened if she’d done this when he already left. He can’t let her alone, not when it’s his fault that her mother is nowhere to be found, and her father is lost inside himself. Rosie doesn’t deserve to know fear and grief at this young an age. He can’t bear to drag Mrs. Hudson into all of this, either, when it’s already so dangerous for the three people he had vowed to protect.

How could he be so selfish?

He stays kneeling before John’s chair, his hands at Rosie’s sides to steady her. She cocks her head at an angle, her hands still reaching forward to try and touch his face. Her father is fast asleep on the couch. He can’t leave her. Not in a mess like this.

The sunlight streams in through the window so that a taller shadow of her is cast against the back of the chair. She’s more solid and real than any hallucination Sherlock’s mind could conjure. “Ah?” Rosie asks.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

_Present_

A shrill ring pierces the heavy darkness in Sherlock’s bedroom. Someone is calling his mobile.

He growls and pushes himself up off the bed. Ever since returning from Tehran with Mary and John, he had looked forward to the abyss of sleep that always welcomed him after any long and difficult case. But that night had given him no respite, and he had tossed and turned on the sheets, his mind rushing and restless, as if the case hadn’t been solved it all. He had spent the hours trying to silence all his thoughts, to have just a moment of peace.

Sherlock plods over to the windowsill, where he had left his mobile lying face-down. Outside the sky is still a hazy dark blue; it’s very early in the morning. He slumps forward and leans his forehead against the wall, eyes closed to protect them from the harsh glow of his screen, and brings the phone to his ear. “Yes.” His voice is low, gravelly, still exhausted from his travel and sleepless hours.

“Mr. Holmes,” comes a familiar voice. He sounds excited, almost breathless. “It’s me, it’s Noah – Sorry, did I wake you?”

“No.” It’s his contact within the Luxembourg satellite company, the one who’d told him months ago of how the Moriarty broadcaster had taken advantage of two of their malfunctioning vessels. He rubs the space between his brows. “What do you want?”

“So much to tell you, Mr. Holmes,” Noah says. “I was reviewing the various source points of the signals that reach our satellites. They always come from places that SES has teleports stationed – but, then, I came across a months-old log of a signal that seems to have originated from London. Nowhere near our British teleport in the Isle of Man. I think I’ve found them, Mr. Holmes. Our hacker. They were in your city.”

“What?” says Sherlock. He’s a little more awake, though he has to run his hand over his face to assure it. “What do you have?”

“I’ve found the computer used to hijack our satellites and send out that video to every screen in England,” reports Noah, “Well, I’ve found its IP address. I’ve been able to trace it to a location somewhere just in London!” Then he suddenly lowers his voice, as if sheepish. “I’m… calling you at this hour because what I’ve done isn’t quite legal. It isn’t exactly SES’s research. It’s my own.”

Sherlock doesn’t really hear his confession. He’s pushed his weight off the wall with one hand, his breathing suddenly quickened. He stares with fully open eyes out the window, at the night sky free of clouds. “You found the computer that hijacked _your_ satellite?”

“Well, yes, though it wasn’t the work of the computer alone. I traced the address to what appears to be a residential area, so I imagine it’s within a flat or building that has a satellite dish of some sort. That, I would think, is what our hacker used to transmit the video into space.”

“You said before,” Sherlock prompts, “SES’s satellites have the ability to communicate with satellite phones. Correct?”

“I, er – yes, among other abilities. We _can_ program our machines to do that, but that isn’t their main purpose – phones? I thought you were looking for the broadcaster.”

“Yes, yes,” Sherlock says impatiently, waving. “Now what was the address?”

Noah gives him the address of a flat on Berthon Street in Deptford, a southeastern district in London. Sherlock changes into a suit and throws on his coat and scarf, and gets into a cab, the sky above him still dark, in under ten minutes.

Berthon Street is less like a proper street and more like a collection of dead ends branching together, lined with small red-bricked townhouses occupied by students and unmarried workers. It’s just a small part of Deptford, which, while famous for its designation as the main administration hub of the British Navy in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, has been in economic decline ever since all of its docks had closed. Sherlock rarely visits the area, though he knows of it thanks to Mrs. Hudson’s countless rants and raves about their famous (or so he’s been told) street market.

 At half-past four in the morning, the turn into Berthon Street is indistinguishable from a deep trench between two cliffs, and the ubiquitous red brick looks more like shadowy purple. The air stings his lungs with the smell of dust and a heady hint of petrol. There are no lampposts in the area, so aside from the occasional glow of a telly from a half-shaded window, or the reflection of the sky against the dented hood of a car, he doesn’t have much light to accompany him. Still, Sherlock walks on, hands in his pockets, facing only forward.

He’s about to come face to face with the person who’s eluded him for several months. Or, at least, he’s about to uncover the machine they’d used to put Jim Moriarty’s face on every screen in the country. The power that would’ve required, the strategy. The genius. Thinking of the information he might find in this flat, of what _he_ could do with a supercomputer and a satellite at his disposal, hastens his step along the pavement. _They could have done anything with 2E and 2F’s power,_ Noah’s voice sounds in his head, echoing those words he’d uttered months ago, _Disrupt television signals, radio, even transmit communications to, say… private satellite phones._ Hope is shaped like a satellite dish.

Along Berthon Sherlock walks up by a shadow leaning against a sedan. It pushes off as he comes close. “Got a smoke, mate?” Sherlock ignores him, and continues forward. “C’mon, mate, I’m all out.”

“Not my problem,” Sherlock calls back, not slowing his pace.

“Ten quid, then,” he says, “Just to buy me some.”

“You don’t need to. You smell like a 20 pack already, anyway.” He senses the stranger following close behind, sighs, and steels himself for when he’s grabbed by the shoulders and twisted around to face him. The man is unhealthily pale, his beard a grey and unkempt scruff, but his most noticeable feature is probably the switchblade he’s currently holding up against Sherlock’s neck.

“Posh boy like you thinks he can go anywhere and get fuck all done to him, eh?” he sneers. His breath stinks of alcohol. “What you doin’ down here anyway? It’s a girlfriend, innit. Keep her here where your other posh friends can’t find and pop in for a shag whenever. So, where does she live, mate?”

Sherlock grabs the mugger’s wrist, and twists it so that the he shouts in pain. He yanks it downward so that he hunches over, then Sherlock pulls back his fist and punches him hard in the side of his face. There’s a sharp crunch; the man shouts once more and drops his switchblade to the concrete, and then Sherlock punches him again, and then again, and again, and again, and again, until his knuckles are burning white-hot and his breath is heavy and the dusty air around him is filled only with the sound of the man begging him to stop.

Sherlock keeps no track of the time, but eventually he emerges from his fog to see his assaulter hobble away, slouched forward and sobbing a string of swears at him. Sherlock cradles his sore fist in his other hand, and hisses at how tenderly the skin of his knuckles throbs just from his own touch. The blood on it looks black in the dark night. He’s covered now in a thin coat of sweat, which quickly grows to chill him.

He takes a moment to slow his breath and his heartbeat, before turning back around and heading deeper into Berthon Street towards his goal, determined to let nothing stop him again.

Just a minute’s walk more, and he sees the right turn just ahead into one of Berthon Street’s many branches. The flat Noah had mentioned is one in a row of small townhouses. Once he makes it around the corner, he’ll be able to spot them. He’ll find his way inside the flat, figure out which room holds the computer that had stopped the country, and he’ll solve this once and for all.

The street is so quiet that the only sound Sherlock hears is his own shoes over the pavement. He walks briskly. Above him there is no moon; it’s too close to morning for it to still hang high above the city. He remembers, months ago, when he had peered through his brother’s telescope and looked upon its rocky, imperfect surface, after thinking for years that it was only smooth stone.

Sherlock comes up just before the corner, and he feels his veins pulse heavy with adrenaline. He swiftly turns right, and finds –

– nothing.

Sherlock blinks in bewilderment. The row of townhouses the address was meant to lead him to is gone, completely flattened. On the ground are piles of grey rubble rising and rippling into one another. Out of some of them peek the dilapidated remains of concrete walls and foundation, outlining the perimeters of the narrow buildings that had once stood there. Where there was meant to be the façade of several identical red-brick houses lined up together, there is only the faint and distant sight of the flats on the next street over, and above them the dim, cloudless sky.

No, Sherlock thinks to himself stubbornly, it can’t end like this. He scans the meters-long wreckage for clues, for a sign that one of these flats had once housed the computer and satellite dish that transmitted the Moriarty signal to SES’s satellite, until he realizes his feet have been carrying him down the remainder of the street, and he’s come to its dead end, a lone red brick wall. They all look the same. All razed to the ground, leaving only dust and rust and shattered glass. No data. No memories. He finds that he’s panting, and leans a hand against the wall.

 _Deptford, dear. Bloody Deptford. They’re demolishing buildings left and right,_ he suddenly remembers, with a sickening drop within his chest, Mrs. Hudson’s complaint to him weeks earlier in 221B, before they’d been distracted by Rosie’s crying.

The hacker had known. They’d known, when they chose this flat months and months ago, that it was slated for demolition, and after completing their work of broadcasting the Moriarty video to every screen in England, they’d be able to disappear without leaving behind any trace. Leaving nothing for him. No computer containing all their code, no co-opted television dish.

He’s lost his last connection to the SES satellite floating out in space. In his head he sees it, ethereally white, through the eyepiece of his brother’s telescope, sliding slowly out of the tiny circle of view he’s been allowed. He’s lost it, and his chance to make use of its range and power himself, to locate and speak to –

– to Irene.

The air around him is cold. It had always sounded like an outlandish idea, to find the computer that had hijacked SES’s satellite and see if he could try and recreate that, to see if it could break through MI6’s layers of security and give him a way to talk to her on her MI6 mobile and find out where she is. To see if she’s still alive. But the exhilaration in finding a new lead in the Moriarty case, after so many months of silence, had made him feel like he was capable of anything. But he isn’t. He’s only human, in every infuriating sense of the word.

And so is she.

The thought comes to him uninvited and wholly undesired, but it had always been there, lurking in the dark, a possibility but not, he had insisted to himself so many times, a fact. But the recent series of events, and all manner of logic, point singularly toward it: Irene Adler is dead.

Sherlock curls forward, one hand still against the wall beside him, the other wrapped loosely around his abdomen like he aches from his very centre. His legs suddenly feel incapable of carrying all his weight. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to stop himself shivering.

 _Your fault,_ a voice inside him roars, _your fault your fault._ It echoes inside his skull, and curls around his throat and threatens to suffocate him. It sounds almost juvenile, and yet it overpowers everything else in his head. It had been he to who’d backed out from the assignment, leaving it free for her to take. He who’d urged her to do whatever it took to finish it. “ _It’s your only way back.”_ And it had been he who’d left his MI6 device in that godforsaken office in Tivat, Montenegro, in an attempt to cut ties with her once and for all. Every memory rushes forward, rusted at the edges, smelling of blood. It was him. It was all his fault that he’d lost her.

There’s a faint stillness in the air in front of him, and he knows, nauseous with dread, immediately why. He knows she’ll be there when he opens his eyes. She’s waited long enough.

“You look as if you need some company.” Her voice, so carefully recreated in his mind, is like a balm. The world around him goes silent just to give it space.

He finally looks, breath escaping weakly from his lips, and she stands in front of him – not in the t-shirt and faded denim from Montenegro as she’d been appearing lately, but in her glittering black dress from that fateful night in Mycroft’s house. Her hair is swept up and her face is calm and pristine. She’s a jarring, frightening sight, especially with wreckage and concrete as a backdrop. She’s looking right back at him with curious eyes. He can only stare back for so long, before the hurt overtakes all his senses, and he closes his own eyes tightly again.

He knows, finally, why she’s been coming to him. His mind creates these ghosts in dire times because their presence helps him achieve something. And now he’s figured out why he’s been subconsciously summoning her all this time, why he lets himself be taunted with the memory of her face and skin and voice. He bows his head toward the ground.

“I can’t,” he finally says, and his voice is hoarse.

“Pardon?”

“I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Say goodbye.”

In all the times they had parted ways across their lives, in secrecy, in silence, in anger – the word was never uttered. She’d texted it to him once, but it turned out she hadn’t needed to. But he needs to say it now, to let her go, to cut her off before the grief spreads throughout his system and poisons him.

He can’t do it. He can’t let go of the one person on this earth who knows – who… knew… loneliness like him, who knew danger and desperation the same way he did. He’d seen how she drew only strength from all those things, not self-pity. She had given him that and so much more. And he had given her nothing.

He shivers. What gives him the right to keep her this way, as if he deserves to cling greedily to the idea that she could still be alive somewhere on this earth, in hiding yet safe? No, no. He had his chance.

Sherlock forces himself to look at her again. She’s still standing there in front of him, in her perfect dress. The sky above them has begun to warm in color, warning of an approaching sunrise. This is the last time he’ll ever see her: in secret, in the dark. His fingers tense against the wall like he might be able to crush a part of it with his bare hand.

“Sherlock,” she suddenly says. It’s so quiet, and gentle, and he’s thrown viscerally into the memory of the two of them sharing a bed in Karachi, when she had grabbed his arm and they breathed against each other, letting the silence speak for them. He wants that again; god, he wants nothing more than to share that space with her and to feel that peace. He wants to hold her.

He looks at her, and he’s almost knocked back by the force of what he sees. Instead of that blank expression, she stares at him with softened eyes, a curved mouth. It’s an expression he’s seen genuinely on her so few times, yet his memory of it is perfect. It’s her smile.

It’s this way that she leaves him. “Goodbye,” she says.

He wants to laugh, even though his throat stings with everything he’s not saying. It’s so apt that she does the job for him.

The daylight begins to break. Since they both stand by a tall brick wall, they’re protected by a sharp triangle of shadow so that the sun can’t quite touch them yet. The yellow light continues to creep over the facades of the houses along Berthon Street, over the rubble left of the demolished flats,  until their triangle slowly recedes, and Sherlock sees the top of her head begin to blacken and burn away like a leaf under a magnifying glass.

 _Go,_ he thinks, as if he were commanding her. The hand he has against the wall closes into a fist, and he thumps it against the brick in anger. Just like that, Irene’s shoulder and heels and half her face catch the sunlight, too, and now she’s burning away twice as fast.

 _You knew this would happen. You always had._ He hits the wall again, throwing his weight into it, and then a hole forms at the centre of her, so that she begins to sear from the inside out, too. _Did you think you needed to protect me?_ He thinks of that fight they had in her hideaway in Montenegro. Her words had been sharp and merciless; he wonders if it was all just to drive him away. _I would’ve stayed. I wish I’d stayed._

He hits the wall again and again, letting out a sound of agony at that last time, thinking all the final things he still has to say to her, questions, accusations, pleas. _Were you close to getting home?_ as her neck and shoulders disappear. _Were you afraid?_ right as the last of her black dress dissolves, and then _No. You’re never afraid_. Time is running out. _I’ll be fine without you eventually,_ he assures the quickly vanishing apparition. _You were always fine without me._

And then the last shred of her he sees, a hint of her smile, finally blackens and disappears in a curl of smoke. Then, and only then, does he say his final thought, and even then it’s barely a whisper in his head, confessed to the empty air. _I love you._

There is light everywhere now. Somewhere in the distance, birds are chirping.

Sherlock realizes after a time that he’d been squeezing his eyes closed. When he opens them, he watches two lone drops of moisture fall from his face to the pavement, before quickly fading away.

He stays leaning against the wall. He feels empty. His legs seem unable to follow his command to get him upright. He just wants to rest.

This is the part where he walks home and pretends nothing had happened. Mrs. Hudson will simply think he’s having one of his post-case moods, and fuss a little more over his tea than she usually does. John will be too distracted by his delight over his family being complete again. Sherlock remembers, with a bitter hint of humor, the time he’d promised himself he would eventually confess everything about Irene to his best friend. There’s no need for him to know now. Mary will probably notice, because she always notices. It pains him to imagine the possibility that she’ll come up to him in a private moment and ask if he’s alright. He knows that he wouldn’t know how to answer.

He’s tired. He wishes he could fall asleep right there against the brick wall and then wake up in his bed. He wishes a lot of things.

Above him the cloudless sky is a deep orange, stretching endlessly upward. In his exhaustion, Sherlock imagines himself rising up through it, past the atmosphere. He wonders, dazed, just how far he’d have to fly, how many light years he’d have to travel, so that he can turn around and see the Earth as nothing but a dot, twinkling and fading into black space.  

 _What happens immediately in one point in the universe might happen a million years later in another,_ she told him once over a phone call, one that now feels so far away from him. _That’s why we can look up and see stars that no longer exist._ Is there a point in this universe where he can stand, then, so that he can peer through a telescope and see her, walking the Earth, thriving, alive? Can he travel far enough that he can see that quiet moment between them in Montenegro, when they’d lain together across a too-small mattress, hiding from a ray of moonlight?

And further back in time, before Montenegro, even before the mission, so that he can simply watch her roaming Europe, safe, free, causing trouble like she always had. They would be apart, but she would be alive, and that would’ve been enough.

That’s how he finds the answer to his impossible question suddenly. Yes, that’s it. The distance he would have to travel from the Earth, to a spot in space where he can look back and be able to see her as she once was. That is the size of the universe.

The realization swells inside his chest and feels suspiciously like heartbreak, but it gives him a little bit of energy, too. He pushes away from the wall and begins the long journey home, alone.

He’s already halfway out of Berthon Street when he hears the rumble of a car just behind him, then it slows down so it can follow his speed. He growls and drags his hand over his face. Of _course_ he’s here.

The driver sounds the horn. Sherlock waves a hand. “Go away,” he says, voice rough. They sound it again, a string of persistent beeps. “I said go away.” He swears to god, if he tells the driver to press it one more time –

Another beep, and Sherlock whirls around. “Can’t you see I’m _busy?_ ” he shouts, motioning at nothing in particular.

The back passenger window of the sleek black car rolls down, and as predicted, Mycroft pokes his head out from it, face set and serious. “Sherlock, get in.”

“Oh, _fuck off._ ” Sherlock turns around again, prepared to walk all the way back home with his brother’s car creeping behind him, if that’s what it takes. God, after all that’s happened. He’d always learn of things before Sherlock ever did, and he always wielded more power to do something about them. He’s probably here now to facilitate the damage control, to nurse his poor wounded little brother back to health. Why couldn’t he just leave him _alone –_

“Sherlock!” snaps Mycroft. “She’s alive.”

Sherlock’s heart stops. He freezes on the pavement, staring ahead at the row of brick houses he has yet to pass by, at the endless road.

He feels as if the early morning chill has gone into his head and clouded his senses. He’d heard Mycroft, but he certainly hadn’t understood him. Slowly, he turns back to stare his brother, whose face belies his stern tone. He looks honest, surprised, maybe even exhilarated. “…What?”

 “She’s alive. She’s here in the country.”

* * *

Sherlock doesn’t remember moving off the sidewalk and getting into Mycroft’s car. But the next thing he knows is that he’s looking at the back of the headrest of the driver’s seat, and he’s leaning back against soft gray leather, and the last of Berthon Street speeds past them in the window. Mycroft is seated beside him, silent, but he seems to know his brother’s eyes have come to be fixed squarely on him.

Sherlock opens his mouth, but it takes him another moment to locate his voice. “How did you find me,” he asks, dumbly. “There aren’t any lampposts or electricity poles in that area. Nowhere for you to install a camera.”

“A man with a bloody nose told me.”

Sherlock sighs. He clenches and unclenches his fist, the muscles there still sore and his knuckles still raw and stinging.

“I honestly thought you’d have more questions than this,” comes his brother’s voice.

“Just…” Sherlock’s lips tighten. He swallows. “…please. Just tell me everything.”

Mycroft is quiet for just a moment. But then he begins: “She called me from the border of Turkey via a burner phone. On my personal number. I’m still trying to work out who’d given her that, but it’s very her, don’t you think?” When Sherlock doesn’t answer, he continues: “She let Shield and Browning die instead of transferring them alive back to Britain. She injured herself in the process, too, and has spent the last few weeks recovering and unable to respond to her handler. That’s a failed mission in MI6’s book, but it must count for _something,_ right, she asks me?” Mycroft shrugs. “It does, to be fair. So I sent a jet her way.”

Sherlock feels his breath catch. He turns to face him. This is an overwhelming supply of new information, but one part of Mycroft’s narrative stands out to him. “ _You_ sent it..?”

Mycroft is facing forward now, his back held straight against the car seat, his profile sharp and unreadable. There is a short silence. He takes in a low, steady breath.

“I don’t exactly have the same wealth of resources as Secret Service. And this wasn’t done with the Government’s blessing, mind. I suspect we can only keep her in the country for a short time before word gets around, though in the meantime I’m looking into ways to make her ability to stay permanent. If she tries to leave again, it’ll be twice as difficult. But this is the best I can do on such short notice.”

Sherlock stares. Mycroft doesn’t look back at him, only stays facing forward, watching the road.

Irene hadn’t fulfilled her end of the deal with MI6. She’d failed to provide adequate service to the country. They had every reason not to respect her request for safe entry. And yet… here is his brother, a civil servant, ignoring all that, for her sake. For his. It makes him dizzy to speculate what that might mean.

Or maybe he’d always known. For a brief moment, Sherlock flashes back to that hot day in their backyard, when his older brother had watched him burn away that golden leaf with a magnifying glass. He’d always been there, teaching him to trust what he felt, assuring him that it would be alright. And that is what he’ll always do.

Sherlock swallows, and tries to slow his heart rate, his breathing. “Well, then. Where have you put her?”

Mycroft looks back at him. His eyes travel down Sherlock then back up. Sherlock lets himself be studied, keeps his body still and turned towards his brother, because all he wants is an answer. His attempt to calm his own heart had failed. He feels as if he might burst.

Finally, Mycroft answers him. “Why, the safest place in all of London.”

Sherlock’s brows furrow. He doesn’t understand. But then he senses that the car has slowed to a stop, and with held breath he looks around at the buildings, the street, out his window –

\- They are parked outside his home, 221B. Its stone facade seems to glitter in the morning light.

Sherlock doesn’t take a second look back at Mycroft, but he doesn’t seem to have anything left to say. He watches his own hand push the car door open, and watches his feet as they step out onto the sidewalk.

The front door is ajar, and Mrs. Hudson stands at it, seemingly waiting for him. She knows what’s going on. Her expression is one of understanding, affection, maybe a little bit of fright. She pulls the door open wider and steps aside to let Sherlock enter.

The stairwell is dim, and each step protests faintly under his feet, but Sherlock only looks forward. When he reaches the top, his limbs feel like ice. The door into his flat is slightly open, and sunlight, white and blinding, streams through.

This is not real, he tells himself. You’ve collapsed from exhaustion on that dead end in Berthon Street, and this is a dream.

But do dreams sprinkle dust over the banister, add stains and texture to the walls? Do they care to make every stair step creak with weight and age? Do they make the sun pouring through a half-open door so bright that Sherlock has to squint?

Dream or not, there is only one way to move forward. He comes up to his door and pushes it open.

Daylight floods his sitting room. He blinks until his sight adjusts, and then he sees a heavy bag set on the centre of the floor, and his eyes move up to see her.

At first she’s only a shadowy silhouette, standing before the glowing window, one hand raised to trace the shape of his violin set on the sill. But the sound of the door pushing open catches her attention, and she turns and her face comes into view, and Sherlock Holmes knows that without a doubt it is Irene Adler, real, present, breathing, alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the risk of spoiling the heavy drama of the moment, I just wanted everyone to know that I like to imagine "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds playing over that last scene, with the chorus hitting just as Irene turns around :)
> 
> Next chapter will be a quick one that ties up some loose ends from Mycroft's POV, just for everyone's information. Work has gotten a little busier than usual, so I'm sorry to say I don't think I can handle a twice-a-week update schedule from here on in. But the original once-a-week is definitely happening.
> 
> Thank you all for reading!


	16. Equilibrium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who commented last week; I truly am so happy to be back :)
> 
> As mentioned before, this is just a quick one that wraps things up from Mycroft's POV. Enjoy!

Mycroft watches his brother stumble in through his front door, and then motions at his driver to pull away.

His car smoothly exits Baker Street. The sun has risen quietly over the city, so that the rows of townhouses are half-veiled in light. They pass little shops, citizens yawning and walking to work, until they slow down in front of a café with a simple striped awning.

Mycroft swiftly pulls his mobile out from his inner pocket, sends a text, and waits half a minute. Soon enough a blonde woman in a red coat exits the shop, folding her emptied paper coffee cup flat before tossing it into the bin.

She opens the door into Mycroft’s car, climbs in, and faces forward without a word. His driver navigates away from the café, and for a while they simply speed down the main road in silence.

“Mrs. Watson,” Mycroft finally says, “You have some explaining to do.”

Mary’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes, though it’s mostly from fatigue. “You already know what I did.”

“Mm.” That’s a few minutes off the timetable, at least. He’s not fond of her perpetual confidence, but he does appreciate her efficiency. After a few seconds, he adds, “Did it have to be my personal number?”

This time, Mary’s eyes do crinkle with humour. “You told me once before it was for family only. Though it would make for a nasty joke.”

“It’s not that. I mean why didn’t you just give her Sherlock’s contact details.”

As soon as it had come, Mary’s smile fades. She chews her lip. “She didn’t want them. Well, not at first.” Finally she turns to look at Mycroft. “I’d told her, when she was recovering, that I wouldn’t say anything to Sherlock if she didn’t want me to. She said she would think about it. And she did, for days and days and days. By the time she was all healed up and I had to move on, she still hadn’t decided. So I gave her yours just in case.” She shrugs. “I didn’t even know she’d come back till you texted me this morning.”

Mycroft settles back against his seat, eyebrows raised. “That certainly sounds like her, making things unbearably complicated for no reason.”

A long pause. Then, Mary says, “She was very nice.”

When Mycroft turns back to her with the surely expected look of bewilderment, she continues, “Her first words to me were to threaten to stab me with a pencil, granted. But all of our conversations afterward were quite pleasant. She even thanked me! I never get thanked.”

“Pleasant,” he says, incredulous. “What did the two of you even do?”

“Oh, we braided each other’s hair and talked about our favourite boy bands - Mycroft, she was shot through the thigh. What do you think we did? I helped her start walking again.” She shakes her head. “She doesn’t like to reveal much.”

“Oh, like you?”

Mary shrugs. “And now you know why we got along.”

Mycroft sighs. “You’re speaking casually to have it appear as if what you’ve done isn’t any great feat. But you rescued Irene Adler from the lair of two prominent enemies of the state then treated a serious injury of hers. Neither of us can deny how difficult that could’ve been.”

Mary’s jaw works. She’s frustrated. “I’m not denying anything. That’s true.”

“So. Why did you do it? Why go through all that trouble?”

Mary looks at him, one eyebrow raised. “Why did you fly her back into Britain when she’d failed her assignment?”

Touché. Mycroft meets her stare for a while longer, before they both lean back to face forward. For a minute or so they ride in a mutually-agreed silence. They’re caught in a bit of traffic at an intersection, so the car moves slowly down the road, and Mycroft watches a small puddle by a sewer grate glisten under the sun, the same way the puddles had in Berthon Street where he was searching for his brother.

“You should've seen him, when I picked him up this morning.” His voice is soft. A car on the lane beside them rolls over the puddle he’d been staring at, stretching a thin layer of water over the cement in the shape of tire tracks. “He looked… lost inside himself.”

He wonders if Mary Watson views their recent actions the same way he does. They weren’t exactly acts of penance; Sherlock is not one to hold grudges or keep a tally of who owes him what. They’re more like acts of balance, restoring equilibrium to something that had gone wrong between them. A plane for a plane. A bullet for a bullet.

Mary doesn’t say anything for a moment. He hears her draw in a subtly shaky breath. “Then it’s a good thing we did what we did, don’t you agree. And it’s a good thing _she_ did what she did.”

“True,” says Mycroft. He coughs. “Even as her motives remain a mystery to me.”

Mary smiles gently at that. “Same. But they seem to make each other happy. That’s enough for me. They deserve to be.” She lowers her eyes, as if searching for something on the floor. She concludes, voice quieter now, “We all do.”

Mycroft stares at her, and wonders briefly what’s going through her mind. Instead, he changes the topic and asks, “What makes you think she makes my brother happy?” When Mary turns to him, frowning, he adds, “You spent two weeks with her; I didn’t. I’m sure you have more insight.” He runs his fingers over his lips in thought. “I know he loves you, and your husband and child. He loves the work he does. I’m made to wonder what it is that Irene Adler gives him.”

Mary looks away again. She licks her lips as she thinks. Only after the car has finished crossing a long, ornate bridge over the water does she finally speak. “I think that… everyone in Sherlock’s life right now helps him work hard to become a better man.” She faces Mycroft. “I think, when it’s needed, she helps him to like himself just as he is.”

Mycroft doesn’t say anything, only shares her gaze. A few seconds later, Mary breaks away with a sigh and a shake of her head, and looks out the window to watch the city speed by. Mycroft does the same, and they don’t speak for a minute or so.

When they turn into a fairly private street without any other cars, Mycroft reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out a very thick envelope. “By the way. This is the real reason why I sent you a text.” He moves the envelope towards Mary.

When she turns and sees it, she scowls and makes a sound of derision. “I didn’t do it for money, for god’s sake.”

“It’s not money.” Mycroft doesn’t pull his hand back. “But it _is_ payment. Just take it.”

Mary eyes him with distrust, of course, but she finally reaches and plucks the parcel from his hand. He leans back into his seat then stares ahead at the road, as if to give her some privacy as she opens it.

He hears her fingers brush over the textured paper of the envelope, and then the tiny rips - and then, as predicted, she gives a quiet gasp. There is a long silence where neither of them move or speak.

He had found the old, battered photographs about a year ago. He and a special task force had been clearing out an abandoned condominium in New Jersey after it was suspected that the building was being used as a headquarters by a terror group conspiring to assassinate the UK Ambassador to the United States. Along with that group’s files and equipment, Mycroft uncovered these when he’d wandered to another floor to see what the decades-old units looked like, preserved all these years and locked away from the public. One particular apartment, in what looked like a very rushed moving-out, had left behind so many things, now greyed and broken down by age and water damage: a tattered couch, a kitchen table, a child’s toys scattered on the floor - and, of course, framed photographs hanging on the walls.

He had had to blink several times in complete disbelief. But the faces of the couple who’d lived there were eerily familiar, with their deep eyes and tight smiles… but more so the face of their mousy, brown-haired daughter, pictured in one frame playing with dolls in the park, in another dipping her feet into the sea.

Mycroft would come to learn later, after appointing an assistant to dig through some American confidential reports, that the husband and wife had died long ago under mysterious circumstances. There were no records of what happened to their child.

It’s simply an act of balance now, he thinks to himself, that he’s returned the photographs to their rightful heir. It took decades, and a journey across the sea, but now they’re where they belong.

“I never took you for a beach person,” he says casually. “But I imagine the shores in New Jersey would be irresistible to anyone.”

Mary doesn’t respond, though he hears her let out a shaky breath. He turns to her and sees her parted, trembling lips, her reddened nose, her shining lashes, as she flips through the yellowed photos.

“Nothing is ever truly gone,” he tells her. “You’ll always know what you used to be. You deserve it, we all do. I believe someone had told me that recently.”

At that, Mary does let out something like a laugh, though it’s dulled by a sniffle. She presses the back of her hand to her mouth and nose, still staring at one particular picture of her running towards whoever is holding the camera, arms happily outstretched. Mycroft settles back and lets her.

A few minutes later, the car slows in front of a flat - Mary’s. It’s what finally pulls her away from looking through the photographs, and she stares up at the building, still quiet and sleepy and still in the bright morning. Her husband John Watson, and her… fully-functioning child, are both certainly still dozing inside.

“Go home to your family, Mrs. Watson,” Mycroft nods.

With a sudden burst of energy, Mary pushes the car door open and climbs out, and Mycroft watches her tuck the envelope quickly into her pocket.

Then, with an arm still on the top of the door, Mary turns around and bends low so that she can look into the car, at him. Her eyes are shining.

He’s taken by surprise for just a second, but recovers. “Goodbye, Mary,” he says.

“Goodbye, Mycroft,” Mary says, with both a grin and a quiver to her voice. “Take a bloody vacation, won’t you.”

He doesn’t reply, though he stretches his lips into a long, friendly line, which is the most similar thing to a smile he can usually manage. Mary returns the expression, and then closes the door and walks away.

“Back to Parliament, Nicholas,” he tells his driver. He still has a full day of work ahead of him unfortunately, one particularly unappealing task being to interrogate a long-time friend who might just be a mole in the British Government. It’s a thankless job, to be sure.

His mobile buzzes in his pocket, and he pulls it out to read a new text.

He only reads it once, but he hides his phone back into his jacket with a satisfied, slightly more relaxed lean of his head against the headrest.

_Thank you_ , it read, from the same number that had called him from the heart of Eastern Europe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This particular chapter has mostly maintained its original form from its first draft, and I think it's obvious why. I've said this to a couple of commenters who had asked, but I don't intend for the timeline of this fic to reach Mary's death. It's so significant (and, honestly, awful) of an event that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the momentum of this story clashing with hers. I'd written this fic before S4 aired with the self-imposed challenge of having it work believably with the canon. The chronology of events within this fic runs with the assumption that there were several days, even weeks between Sherlock, Mary and John flying back to London and the confrontation in the aquarium, and it's only with a deep disappointment that I say that.
> 
> Still - it feels wonderful to conclude things with Mycroft and Mary, whom I think could've had way more interesting interactions onscreen than what we'd seen :) Next week we're coming back to Irene and Sherlock - and we're _not_ going to leave them again ;)
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading <3


	17. Landing

“You never did tell me when your birthday was.”

Sherlock stays standing at his door, and doesn’t respond.

Irene looks at him. He looks pale and exhausted; his eyes are rimmed with red and shadowed underneath, but they’re wide in shock. He keeps a hand, knuckles purple and bruised, resting on the doorknob. She has to worry where he’s been.

She supposes he’s wondering the same about her, too. There’s probably a lot to read off her present appearance: loose and wavy hair, never having properly dried from her midflight shower on the jet home. A clean gray jacket and gray joggers – not her clothes, and not Mary’s.

She looks again at where her hand has landed: on the page of an old picture album left lying on his table. It’s an odd thing to find in his home, but her attention is more strongly drawn to the photograph that her fingers have fanned out over. It sits on top of the adhesive plastic sheet rather than under it, so someone must have taken it out. It’s of him, as a young boy, sitting at a kitchen table with a cake. The timestamp on the lower right corner is yellowed and faded, but still readable.

“January baby,” Irene hums, “I’ll keep that in mind.” She looks back up at him with a wry smile, but nothing about him has changed. Still he stands by his door, covered with his dark coat and scarf, not having moved a step forward or back. Framed by the darkness of the outer hallway he comes across looking even paler and more otherworldly.

Finally, he replies, breathless, “Yes.” His voice is soft like a whisper, but scratchy with fatigue. Yes to his birthday being in January, or yes to her keeping it in mind, she doesn’t know. The two of them fall silent for a long time, though they look nowhere but at each other, until Irene’s eyes water and shift focus to the speckles of dust falling under the light, and she feels a familiar dull twinge in her healing leg.

She nearly asks if she can sit down, but she forgets what she’d planned to say when Sherlock finally opens his own mouth as if to say something – there’s a twitch of muscle in his face and a shudder of air from his parted, suddenly trembling lips, and he looks as if he’s about to break –

And then he pulls into a grimace and closes his eyes, and Irene sees the bruised hand he was keeping on the doorknob curl into a loose fist. He moves it off the door and towards himself, and Irene realizes it must have suddenly cramped or stung.

“Let me see that,” she says, and moves swiftly across the room. When Sherlock sees her approaching he seems to almost shrink back into the outer hallway, but Irene catches his hand just in time and gently brings it towards herself.

No broken fingers or dislocated knuckles, but it’s clear that he’d struck someone so hard – and repeatedly – that even _he_ was hurt from it. His blood is dark red against his white skin, and despite it all she finds the sight of the row of wounds across his knuckles eerily mesmerizing. She’s witnessed Sherlock Holmes attack people physically before, but it had always seemed calculated, graceful, almost choreographed. This, with the torn skin and faint tremble, was so clearly an act of rage. Irene notices, also, that he is alarmingly cold to the touch. How long had he been out?

Her eyebrow quirks upward for a second, and then she looks at him. “Well. Did they learn their lesson?”

Sherlock is still staring at her, though at least this contact seems to have grounded him a bit. No longer is he frozen, the muscles in his face more relaxed, though in this new proximity Irene can more clearly see the lines running along his face, the dark circles beneath his eyes. He also hasn’t shaven yet for today. His gaze now is tired, but also inexplicably sad. Irene can’t remember any other time he has looked like this.

Finally his eyes gently fall closed, and he lets out a sigh that he seems to have held in for hours. He rumbles, almost reluctantly, “I’m… glad you’re alright.”

Irene lets herself smile at that, but it doesn’t last long. Her gaze soon drifts down to his lips. She supposes, had their last meeting ended more pleasantly, this would be the part where they come together for a kiss. But as close as they’re standing now, with his faint breath against her hair, and the tips of their feet touching, she feels no frisson in the small distance between them, no electricity, no heat.

Her lips tighten. There had been a time she’d felt so powerfully drawn to Sherlock Holmes; other times she felt revulsion and a burning anger. She’s never felt… uncertain around him. She has to wonder what it means. The two of them have always interacted in extremes. Irene notices, even, that despite the fact that she continues to cradle his injured hand in her palm, he doesn’t clutch her back. She might as well have held his hand while he was sleeping.

She clears her throat and changes the topic. “I presume Mycroft’s brought you up to speed?”

He blinks a few times. “He told me about your phone call.”

“And about Mary, too?”

“Mary – “ he pauses with a bewildered expression, and it gives Irene no small thrill to see the light shift behind his eyes as he stares off into the distance, possibly seeing pieces of some imaginary diagram fall together with their broken edges fitting perfectly. Mary’s time abroad, his time abroad, hers. Oh, he’s up to speed now.

After several seconds she watches him close his eyes in what looks like both relief and defeat. He brings his free hand up to drag it over his face. “…Of course. Right.”

Irene dares to crack another smile. “We should all be keeping appointment books, shouldn’t we.”

Sherlock takes his hand from over his mouth. “How could you joke at a time like this?”

She’s taken aback by his sudden raise in volume. Her shoulders roll back, but she does her best not to let that tension show on her face. “I consider it a tactic of self-preservation to never take anything seriously.”

“And how well has that worked out for you?”

That’s when she lets the shock widen her eyes. “Sherlock – “

He yanks his injured hand out from hers. “I thought you were dead.”

Irene lets out a gust of air as if she’d been shoved backward. Sherlock stares at her with a wide-awake anger, and possibly irritation at himself for admitting something so volatile.

But as soon as the look had come, it dissolves, as if he had been possessed for only a handful of seconds. Irene watches Sherlock blink hard, and then he sweeps past her into his sitting room, not bothering to remove his scarf and coat. She turns to see him end up where she had once stood: by the table, though facing away from her, laying a hand flat on his old family photo album.

“Thought you’d at least be used to that by now,” she calls after him with all the remaining levity she can summon.

“Stop it,” he says, head bowed. “Stop it.”

She lets her frustration texture her voice. “Shall I come back another time?”

“Are you quite finished mocking me?”

“Mocki-“ Irene starts in disbelief, but she falls quiet. Sherlock stays before the window, and the sunlight frames his still, squared figure.

He’s acting in a way she doesn’t recognize. Bizarre how, in all these years she’s studied his behavior and catalogue of habits, he still manages to be unpredictable. Dangerous.

She remembers, out of the blue, Mary’s words to her from the first time they’d spoken. _It would kill him if something were to happen to you._ She’d spent the next several weeks, while staring up at the stained motel ceiling, or struggling along the length of the peeling wall with a determined grip on the chair she dragged with her like a walker, wondering how true that was.

As much as she had tried, Irene Adler could not picture a grieving Sherlock Holmes. But it seems she has solid evidence of it now – and she’s unsettled by how hard it makes her heart pound.

“You thought I was dead,” Irene says, “and yet here I am. Whatever erroneous conclusions you’d drawn were your own fault.”

Sherlock turns his head to stare at her from behind the fortress of his shoulder, though his eyes pierce her all the same. “ _My_ own fault,” he says.

Irene doesn’t back down. “You left your mobile from MI6 with me. We lost the only way we could speak to each other.” The memory of that cold night clings to her skin. “This. Ends. Now. Your words.”

He doesn’t move. “And yet here you are,” he repeats her words, but now they’re coated thick with contempt.

“Yes,” Irene replies with acid brightness, “Just to let you see how alive I am. Because you know how very much I hate it when people think the wrong thing about me.”

Sherlock scoffs and turns his head back to the window. “I certainly thought wrong about _you._ ”

She shakes her head. “You’re going to have to do better than that to drive me away.”

“Oh, do advise me.”

“Sherlock,” Irene says sharply. She feels that instinctive flare of anger within her, but she can see the direction they’re both hurtling towards. She grits her teeth and crushes that anger to dust inside her fist. “God knows we’re not standing in this room to argue.”

“Then what _are_ we here to do?” Sherlock finally turns around, though instead of hostility he glares at her with a wild frustration.

Irene stands her ground. But she would be a fool to think he doesn’t see the frantic way she blinks, or how tightly she holds the line of her mouth. “I was hoping you would tell me.”

There’s a discomfiting silence. Sherlock looks struck, and, for once, almost remorseful for how their reunion has gone so far. But that flicker of sorrow only lasts a moment, and then he closes his eyes. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“It would be boring if you always did,” says Irene, not without gentleness. She dares to step forward. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Sherlock keeps his eyes closed, but he doesn’t hesitate, “You always know.”

Irene would smile if she had the energy to. “Not now I don’t. I haven’t the slightest idea.”

He looks at her again, tired, unguarded. The bright day shining behind him makes his face look bonier and more shadowed. “Then let me keep this one to myself.”

His voice is so small. Irene feels something inside of her twist, and suddenly she wants to be near him again. She takes another stride forward – but then Sherlock shrinks back, putting up a hand. “No, please don’t.”

She stops, though she hears the heavy pulse of her heart in her ears. “Help me make sense of everything.”

He turns his face away, his profile cutting into the sunlight. She sees him lean partly against the table for support. “I won’t be of any help.”

She starts to move again across the room. “I just want to understand – “

“I said _don’t, come, near_ ,” Sherlock interrupts, firmly putting his palm up again. When Irene freezes, he drops it back to his side as he turns, back slumped with an invisible weight. “Won’t you leave me alone for one bloody moment.”

No. This isn’t fair. Irene bites her trembling lower lip, but she finds she can’t hold her heated words back. “We made a deal long ago, Sherlock. No hiding.”

“Don’t,” he says emphatically, and the boom of his voice seems to make the very air shake, “play the ‘hiding’ card with me. Don’t you dare. Not with how much hiding you’re doing now.”

A fire seems to surge inside her, and she stares at him with wide, hostile eyes. “Pardon me?”

Sherlock spins back to face her again, expression ablaze, as if rising up to her unspoken challenge. He lifts a finger and points it accusingly toward her. “You were shot across the right leg. You’re wearing joggers because your thigh is still dressed in a bandage, which would be visible if you’d chosen to wear jeans or a dress. Judging by the state of your hair you hastily showered even before you landed in London to erase any trace or scent of medical treatment still on you. When you walked towards me earlier you held your arms just slightly away from your sides because your underarms are sore from using crutches, also indicated by the fact that the edges of your left shoe are significantly dirtier than your right, because you’ve been walking with it raised off the ground. You’d used crutches while recovering and even while traveling here – but you chose to come to my flat without them, because you didn’t want me to see the extent of your injuries.” He drops his hand. “Irene Adler, recently returned from the dead, and still curating her image as meticulously as ever.”

Irene finds that she’s breathing hard. “Stop it. You’re just saying all this to distract us both.”

“Then leave me alone. You seem to have forgotten you’re off the assignment, Agent Adler; you’re no longer required to pry into other people’s business.”

“Don’t speak to me that way,” she raises her voice sharply to almost a shout, “How _dare_ you. After I took over a job you dropped so you could chase after satellites.”

A muscle in his cheek twitches, as if he’d stopped his rage from showing on his face just in time. He sneers, “A job at which you failed.”

“Because of _you,_ ” she explodes. Sherlock’s sneer falters, so that when she takes a threatening step forward, he doesn’t even react. The words tumble out from Irene’s mouth, and she can’t stop them, she doesn’t want to: “They were looking for _you._ Everyone was. My teammates wished they were working with you and not me. The generals – they were looking to auction you off to their clients.” She gives a hard, bitter laugh. “You think it’s so easy to disentangle our lives from one another’s. Margaret Shield shot me in the leg because I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. To her, Irene Adler was nameless and dispensable.” She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment. “Then I wake up, and I’ve been found by Sherlock Holmes’ friend, Mary Watson. And she gives me my ticket back home, and it’s Sherlock Holmes’ brother. And I just – “ she has to pause when a muscle in her injured thigh burns in protest at her weight, and she hisses at the pain but doesn’t move a hand to comfort it – “I followed their trail of crumbs because I had nowhere else to go. But I hoped, I wanted to know if it would lead me to an answer, why it is that we keep crossing paths, why I have to keep hearing your miserable name when I thought I was already finished cleaning up after you. Because we’re so _similar,_ aren’t we? We – “

Irene finds that she’s out of breath. Her throat stings from the anger in her voice. “I want nothing more than to move out from your shadow.”

The realization had come to her just as quickly as it had spilled from her lips. She looks to see Sherlock frozen still, his face pale, the focus in his eyes lost, like they no longer understand each other’s languages. He still keeps the tips of his fingers on the table, just lightly over the photo album. She has nothing to hold on to.

For an eternity they stare at each other, the light surrounding them suddenly cold. It’s as if they’ve finally used up all the words they were allotted to say to each other in their lifetimes. A faint ring begins to sound out in Irene’s ears to fill the empty space.

When the ring increases to deafening volume, that is when Sherlock finally speaks. His shoulders sag, but not in defeat. The look on his face is cool and blank. “Then go.”

Irene is still for only the briefest moment, staring at him.

And then, abruptly, she turns around and bends to collect her bulky black travel bag from the carpet. She can feel the warmth of his presence just behind her, but it never wavers.

She thinks she hears him tell her one more thing, though it’s camouflaged by the creaky swing of his door as she pulls it open and the knock of her shoes against the hardwood floor.

“Welcome home.”

* * *

Irene opens the door into Martha Hudson’s flat, and already the landlady is fluffing a pillow set at the end of her floral-print sofa, a knitted blanket draped over it. She turns and gives a radiant smile – the first that’s been directed at her since she’d landed in London, Irene realizes.

“Oh! Down so soon?” she says brightly. “Sorted everything out, then?”

Irene is stunned for just a moment, thrown off by how cheerful her mood is compared to what she’d just gone through upstairs. “I… think so.”

Mrs. Hudson gives her an oddly affectionate look of understanding. “Difficult to tell with him, isn’t it? Anyway.” She motions at her set-up on the short but temptingly fluffy-looking sofa. “You can sleep here for the time being. And put that heavy bag down. Feel at home.”

There’s that word again. She’s starting to lose sense of what it means. “Mrs. Hudson… you needn’t be so kind to me.”

“Nonsense!” she flaps a hand as she steps around to the kitchen, head turning left and right as if searching for something. “This is how I’d treat any friend of 221B.”

“I’m not – “ Irene starts, but a scratch in her throat interrupts her. When Mrs. Hudson turns back to give her a curious look, she shakes her head. “You’re mistaken, I was only here to discuss a small matter with – “

“Don’t start,” Mrs. Hudson cuts her off with a surprising firmness, enough that Irene really does shut up. The older woman stands straight at the entrance of her kitchen and crosses her arms. “No need to lie to me. I don’t let anyone sent by Mycroft in here until he spells out to me in excruciating detail, over the phone, exactly what they’re here for. I know why you’ve come and what you’ve gone through, and I’m telling you that it’s absolutely fine.” A pause, then she shrugs. “Well, what passes for ‘fine’ in a place like this.”

Irene stares at her in wonder. “How could you have gotten the entire story so quickly?” She’d called Mycroft in the dead of night, and arrived in England only a few hours later today.

“I’m a good listener is all.” Mrs. Hudson frowns. “Nobody seems to be one these days, to be quite honest.” With that, she gives a small, satisfied hum and pulls a roller luggage bag out from behind her in the kitchen.

“Where are you off to?” asks Irene.

“Vacation!” she says. “Four days at the beach. Had it scheduled _weeks_ before you came around dear, and the tickets are a bugger to refund, so sorry. Not to worry, I’ve put labels on everything in the fridge.” She rolls up to Irene’s side, just by the door out. “Enjoy your stay, Miss Adler, and – I know you’ll figure things out with Sherlock, you’re very clever. Maybe cleverer than he is.” Her shoulders quirk up and she puts on a toothy, conspiratorial smile. “Ah! Just don’t tell him I said that.”

With a last friendly pat on the shoulder, Mrs. Hudson scoots out whistling a tune, and Irene finds herself alone in her flat.

She takes the few tired steps to the table and lays her bag there, then she drops onto the sofa with a sigh of relief – the soreness in her thigh dissipates, grateful for the decrease in weight. In that heady, pain-free euphoria, Irene finds herself lying back and welcoming all the warm feelings she owes herself: she’s still alive. She successfully called and negotiated with Mycroft Holmes. She made it back into London.

The sense of peace is short-lived. Only a few seconds later, with her head leaning against the back of the sofa, Irene opens her eyes to the white ceiling and remembers who lives just above it.

There’s no sound of his footsteps echoing through, but she imagines him moving about in his flat, carrying on with his day as if she weren’t in the floor below. It’s like a small-scale diagram of how they’d lived the last four years, parallel but never quite meeting. Maybe it would have been better to keep it that way.

Irene forces herself to stop thinking about him. Instead she shifts her attention to her bag containing her few “possessions”: a handful of her belongings that Mycroft had kept as evidence after she’d first fled London years ago, plus the few things she’s collected along the away.

She unzips the bag and first locates the burner mobile she had used to call Mycroft Holmes from Turkey. Just a bar of battery left; she uses the last of it to send the man a final text, _Thank you._ The two of them had never gotten along, to be sure, but she feels she owes him at least these words.

She digs through the rest of the contents with a faint feeling of wonder, like she was peering into a time machine – some of her old dresses and tops and even a pair of black heels from her home in Belgravia, sealed off all these years in some evidence locker in Secret Service while she was in hiding, and now returned to her. They smell fresh and clean as if she’d worn them just last week, to the point that Irene is dazed by the surrealism of it all.

At the very bottom her fingers brush against something smooth and hard. She pulls out, to her awe, her original Blackberry, newly charged and switched on. There’s a surge of feeling in her chest, a mix of nostalgia, terror, begrudging gratitude. With a slightly trembling thumb she navigates to the Contacts list and reads all the names of her old friends and clients. Some are dead. Some are missing. Some are possibly glad she’d disappeared.

Even in her daze, Irene feels as if she’d seen something… wrong when she first started scrolling through the list, as if there was a single new stroke on a canvas hidden amidst all the brushes of color. She navigates back up to the list of contacts listed under “A” –

_Ayek, Fatma._

She feels her heart swell. Had Mycroft looked into her mission file and programmed Fatma’s number into her phone before returning it to her? She taps her name and brings the mobile to her ear.

One ring. Two rings. Three, four…

There’s a rustle of sound as someone picks up, and then a familiarly deep and soothing voice comes through the receiver – “Who is this?”

“Fatma,” Irene says her name like a gasp.

“ _Adler?_ ” the voice says in disbelief.

“It’s me,” Irene says, finding her voice sounding louder and clearer, so that she realizes that she’s smiling.

“Oh my god,” Fatma breathes, “Adler! Thank god, I thought you were dead, what happened? “

“I made it out,” she laughs, and the sound feels utterly new and foreign in her throat, “Oh, god. Fatma, I shot them both. Browning and Shield. It wasn’t the objective, but – “

“To hell with Browning and Shield, I’m glad you’re alright,” Fatma sounds exhilarated, so different from the serious and restrained character she’d put on while they were on assignment, and Irene finds herself feeling whole in a way she hasn’t felt for a long time. And then her partner’s breathing quiets, and she takes a long pause. “Adler. I’m so sorry I left you. When everything went to chaos, I could… only think of my family, and where they would be without me – “

“Please,” says Irene, “I promised you, that you would see your children again. You did nothing wrong.” She takes in a deep inhale. “Are you with them now?”

“With one of them, yes,” says Fatma. “I am with my son in America, helping with the forgery case.”

Irene remembers that conversation they’d had months ago in that Istanbul kitchen. Fatma had mentioned that her eldest son knew of her job as an agent for the Turkish government, and that even he was dabbling in espionage by investigating a forged art con operation in Chicago. “You’re back to work so soon?”

“It’s a far less deadly job than our assignment in Istanbul, to be sure,” Fatma says. “For one thing, these people don’t have ex-military bodyguards. But I’m imposing a curfew on my Gabriel all the same.” She gives a soft chuckle, and then grows serious. “What are you doing now?”

Irene is caught off-guard by the question. “Just finding my feet back home.”

“Prefer to find them somewhere else?” asks Fatma, sounding almost sly. “I did not lie to you back then when I said you could be of use in this investigation. We _do_ still need someone for undercover work.”

It takes a few seconds, but Fatma’s suggestion sinks in. Irene first falls into a state of shock – and then finds herself buzzing with… energy? Fear? She feels as if she can’t move the phone away from her ear.

She hasn’t been in London six hours, and already here is an invitation for her to leave it. Mycroft Holmes had warned her that her safety here isn’t guaranteed. Flying out would jeopardize it even further.

She’s fought for so long just to get here. So much that she’s earned, and so much that she’s lost. It feels as if she’s spent her entire life working towards a reward that possibly didn’t even exist.

 _…What_ is _that reward?_ she finds herself asking. If it was safety, she hadn’t gained it. If it was home, well, she was currently spending the night on a landlady’s sofa.

If it was someone…

“Adler?” Fatma’s voice cuts through her thought. “Will you join me?”

Irene looks up again to the white ceiling. It is silent and still as before. She thinks of the man just above it, leading his life that is now, and maybe forever, parallel to hers.

She closes her eyes. “Alright.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry to take so long with this one. Had to sort out some IRL stuff, and I had a change of heart regarding how a part of this chapter goes, and have spent the last few days rewriting it. Geez, you guys. I outline and draft my fics months in advance to avoid this specific problem, and then it freakin' happens anyway. It's exhausting!!
> 
> I'll try to have next chapter up in less than a week. Thank you all so much for reading!
> 
> Alternative chapter title: "Why God, Why Are They Like This."


	18. An Object In Motion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's there to say? I can only hope this makes someone smile after this senseless week. Wishing love and safety to you all. <3

Baker Street in the nighttime is all too familiar a sight. Irene Adler gazes at it for a long time out Mrs. Hudson’s window. Only the yellow light from a lamppost gives dimension to the nearly empty road and the stone steps of neighboring homes.

She flies out to America in the morning, but she’s leaving Baker Street tonight. She prefers not to give this place any more emotional power over her by sleeping in it... again. The lonely roads of London before sunrise, something she hasn’t been able to witness in years, will be more than enough to make up for it.

Fatma Ayek had been able to secure her plane tickets to Chicago. Beside her is her travel bag, fully packed with what little she currently owns, both the old and the new. She catches her reflection in Mrs. Hudson’s mirror by the door, and the sight surprises even her: her hair is perfectly done up, and her dress, a deep green knee-length with sheer sleeves, embraces her the same sleek and sensual way her dresses in Belgravia did. The single black pair of heels she’d found in her bag, though they give her injured thigh some mild pain, still slip on like silk. Her lips are sharply lined with red. It’s as if the last five years had never passed.

She has every single thing she wants to take with her, except one.

For hours she’d debated just leaving it where she’d found it. She finds no pleasure in the idea of going back up to the sitting room, especially if there’s a chance she might have to run into _him_ again. But in that moment, the idea of Baker Street becoming its permanent home is just as repulsive, and at one in the morning, armed with the hope that the upstairs resident had long since collapsed into bed from sheer fatigue, Irene Adler resolves to take back a gift she regrets ever giving.

She leaves her travel bag by the front door, removes her heels and places them neatly down beside it, then moves silently up the steps to Sherlock’s flat.

Surprisingly, the door is just slightly ajar, and a slant of cool moonlight falls across the landing. There’s no sign of a lit fire or a lamp still switched on, so it might mean he’s already retired to his bedroom, good.

She pushes the door open to a still and empty sitting room. It’s as if the place had frozen in time when she’d left it, and only now that she’s momentarily back the specks of dust have resumed floating through the air and the clouds out the window have begun to slowly roll by again. She waits a few seconds then steps inside, bare feet over the well-worn carpet, and walks over to the desk.

It’s cold and dim, but there’s enough light from the windows to show her that the old family photo album is still sitting open on the table. Irene hesitates, then traces her fingers over the plastic edge of a page.

“Looking to learn the date of my baptism, too?”

Her heart stops.

She spins around to face the kitchen, and though it’s even murkier than the sitting room, she can see him – a black silhouette sitting in the shadows, the outline of his hair and profile distinct and instantly recognizable, completely still save for the small, quiet movements of his hands as he works on something on the tabletop. She can’t see what he’s doing, but she hears the faint clacking of lab equipment against something wide and flat, like a petri dish.

For just a moment, she considers ignoring him and simply leaving. But that would be an insult to both him and her, and Irene Adler is nothing if not fair. She swallows down her shock and takes a breath.

“I’m leaving for America tomorrow morning,” she tells him simply. “Thought my gracious host ought to know.”

There’s a pause in the small, metal sounds on the table. Irene watches Sherlock’s silhouette, which stays frozen like a photograph.

After what feels like eternity, his work resumes. “You went through an awful lot of trouble to spend one day back home, no?” His voice is deep and a little rough, but frighteningly calm.

A fair point. Irene can only shrug. “Maybe this isn’t home after all.” It’s an anticlimactic thing to admit after all the work she’s done, but forming the words now with her teeth and lips it feels disappointingly correct. “Maybe I’m best myself when I don’t belong.”

“Ha,” says Sherlock, though it sounds bitter and empty. “And what better place to realize that than here with me?”

A glint of moonlight reflects briefly on whatever tool Sherlock has taken a grip of, something long and narrow – Irene realizes half a second later it’s a syringe. He points it downward into the petri dish. There’s a sudden swoop of disgust and dread inside her. Is this his first of the night? His third? Was it because of her?

“What are you still doing up here, then,” he asks, his hands not stopping their practiced movement.

“I came to say goodbye,” she replies, watching to see if that will distract him again.

“That would be unnecessary.”

She almost does start to move toward the door. But she feels like every bone in her body is locked in place, and she can only stand there by the desk, back straight and shoulders squared. She looks at him for the longest time. “Come here.”

At first, Sherlock’s shadow is motionless. Even his tools still over the tabletop, and the very air between them seems to echo from the silence. Irene finds out after a while that she’s been holding her breath.

He wavers, and then he stands up, sets his things down, and moves into the light. He’s wearing that blue dressing gown she fondly remembers over a gray shirt and pyjamas. It’s a jarringly different vision from this morning, when he seemed like an inhuman shadow in his dark coat. He still looks just as pale and tired as before, but now he’s clean-shaven, and his eyes aren’t bloodshot, and his limbs don’t propel him forward with any manic energy, so she’s optimistic he hasn’t taken a hit yet tonight. He’s barefoot like her.

He stops just a foot or so away, and they look at each other. His eyes sweep over her like they might over a client he’s just met. Irene stands her ground and gazes steadily back, the way a client he’s just met wouldn’t.

After a moment, Irene turns, pulls back a seat at the small table, and sits down. Sherlock doesn’t seem taken aback; just a second later he steps around to the other chair and sits down himself. Irene is bent forward, elbows resting in front of her, though he of course leans back, one patronizing hand perched at the edge of the desk. Still he stares at her.

It’s him who breaks the silence first. “So. America.”

Irene nods. “My teammate from the MI6 assignment is there. She’s working to expose an art forgery ring.”

Sherlock makes an amused sound. “Serving justice is your new calling, is it?”

She dares to smile. “I’m giving it a try. Have _you_ found it rewarding?”

A heavy pause. Sherlock’s hand on the table is tense and still. Irene can’t tell if the look on his face means that he’s thinking, or that she’s offended him.

Then, he says, “It’s the most thankless thing I’ve ever done.”

The two of them fall quiet again. Irene tilts her head to one side and tries to read the day off his clothes, his hair and face. She doesn’t understand him. The thought comes to her after years of confidence that she wielded an encyclopedic knowledge what made Sherlock Holmes tick, what intrigued him and what frustrated him, what he liked. But now, sitting together in the dark in this painfully familiar room, she has no idea what move to make next. She doesn’t understand him, and the last few years have only been an elaborate dance in evasion of that fact.

Only one thing to do about it, then. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

His expression is unreadable. “I’m thinking of all the times you had been in my shadow.”

Irene feels the blood drain from her face and fingers. She closes then opens her eyes. “When I said that, I meant – “

“You meant what you meant,” he interrupts. “I’m thinking of all the times I had been angry with you because you didn’t act in a way I expected Irene Adler to. For the sake of my work I have always preferred it when people are predictable. But you’re not my work. You’re not my anything.” There’s an awkward pause then, where they both seem to simmer with discomfort over what that last declaration sounds like. He coughs, and continues, “You shouldn’t feel you have to be what anyone expects you to be. You should only be you. If you think that’s best done in America, then by all means go.”

That seems to be his blessing, then, if Sherlock Holmes ever was one to give blessings. Irene stares at him for a while; she’s sure the soft surprise is visible on her face. “Is that the lesson that Professor would like to teach me?”

He doesn’t laugh. “It’s what you taught me.”

Neither of them says anything for a while. Now they’re both leaned towards the desk, one hand tucked under their chests, the other resting on the tabletop, almost reaching out toward each other. There’s only about an inch or so of space between their fingertips.

Irene searches for something else to say to prolong this moment. “Did anything ever come of the satellites?”

Something shifts behind his eyes. “Nothing. It was a dead end.”

Irene doesn’t know how to respond to that. She thinks, as Sherlock looks away to stare at their hands on the table, that this means both of them had failed at what they’d set out to do when they first began calling each other. It’s the end of their race, and neither of them has won. Neither of them is the unstoppable force they’d believed each other to be. It only begs the question of what draws the two of them together now.

She has to wonder how things would have been had they met under different circumstances, had he not seen her as a case and she not seen him as a threat to her recently secured safety. She would never have felt the need to surprise him, and he the need to challenge her. What would they be if not constantly at odds – or was that all they were meant to be? Now that it seems they’re making peace, is this the end of the road that she shares with Sherlock Holmes?

“I know what you came back up here for,” he says.

“Hmm?”

His face is still. “I’m not so blinded by romance that I believe you were really _that_ engrossed by my childhood photos.” He gestures towards the open album still sitting open beside them on the table.

Irene looks at it, and at the photograph of young Sherlock with his birthday cake. “Not much to see, to be fair. There doesn’t seem to be any pictures of you from before the age of ten.”

Sherlock shakes his head. “That’s another album. Mycroft keeps it somewhere I haven’t found yet.” He seems to sense a heartbeat later that she’s trying to change the topic, then determinedly moves the album closer so that it sits perfectly between the two of them. “You weren’t looking at this particular page earlier today when we met; you’d flipped to it when you heard me coming up the stairs.”

Irene doesn’t break their shared gaze. She’s decided she’s not afraid. “Correct.”

Sherlock says nothing. After a long time, he takes a hold of the next several pages in one hand, and pushes them all aside to open the book to the very last page, right before the back cover.

Laying against the plastic is a single, dead rose, pressed flat from the weight of the pages, but otherwise perfectly whole and preserved.

Irene stares at the flower. When she had seen it in the morning light, it had looked so grayed and old. Now, in the cool darkness, what little tinge of red remains seems to glow with life. She feels guilty now for having wanted to take it away with her.

“You sent me this when I was in hospital, didn’t you?” she hears Sherlock ask.

Irene stays looking at it a little while longer, then faces him again. “When I heard you had been shot, I called in a favour from someone in London and instructed them to leave it at your window.” She shrugs. “I suppose I’m glad to know it reached its destination.”

Maybe he thinks she doesn’t see it, but his hand on the album shakes noticeably. Irene fights the urge to reach out to it, and keeps her arms crossed under her chest.

“That’s how you found out about the Istanbul mission,” she hears him say quietly. “You weren’t keeping tabs on MI6 like you’d told Mycroft. You were keeping tabs on me.”

There’s still a single, tattered leaf attached to the stem of the rose. Exposed again to the open air, it lifts weakly off the page just a millimetre or so. It’s physically impossible, but Irene pictures the rose rising off the plastic, round and whole again, as red and full of life as when she’d plucked it from a bush at a palace in Portugal, where she’d been where she had heard the news that Sherlock Holmes was gravely injured and in hospital. Time might be a construct, as some people theorize, but the destruction in its wake is real and permanent.

“When I told you in Karachi that I would always think of you,” she says after a long time, and her voice is low and soft. “I wasn’t lying. No matter what happens beyond this point, that has been, and always will be, true.”

They’re both utterly silent, neither of them moving their hands off the desk. Sherlock’s eyes are fixed on the flower, though Irene watches him blink, the muscles in his jaw subtly moving.

She thinks to herself, with a hollowness in her chest, that this must be the end. There seems to be nothing else to say, no other place for them to move towards. There’s no need for her in his life and none for him in hers… and yet, she stays seated, leaning towards him.

She swallows the lump in her throat. “I’ve made my decision,” she says, voice steady. “Have you made yours?” The rose stays. She can give him that, at least.

Sherlock doesn’t move. Around them, specks of dust float down through the air.

She doesn’t stand from the chair. “I’m going to be selfish now. You’ve told me not to be what anyone expects me to be. But I hope you’ll always stay the way I knew you.”

He still doesn’t move. He doesn’t seem to have anything to admit. Irene convinces herself to make peace with that fact. Perhaps this is the perfect way to see him last: sat at his desk, deep in thought, the state she had always pictured Sherlock Holmes to be in constantly. She draws in a deep breath, spreads her palms on the table and pushes herself to stand up.

She’s already up and turned away from the desk when his hand shoots out to grab her wrist.

She nearly loses her momentum, and lets out a gasp when she almost stumbles. But she twists around to stare at him – his lips are parted, shoulders hunched forward, and he’s begun to suck in heavy, shaking breaths, though his eyes are shut. The moonlight falls over him in a new, clearer, painfully sharp way.

“Sherlock – “

“Please,” he says, voice trembling, but he still doesn’t look at her, “please don’t do this to me.”

Her chest feels like it might burst. “Don’t – don’t do _what_ – “

“The way I felt when I thought you were gone,” he blurts, “I don’t want to – I don’t want that ever again.”

Irene’s throat burns. She turns so that she can free her wrist from his grasp. And then she puts her hands firmly on either side of his head, and tilts him back so that they can look at each other. His eyes are wide, bewildered, faintly reflecting the light of the moon and the lone yellow streetlamp outside, and they make her ache. He stares like he’s seeing her for the first time.

“You won’t have it again,” she says firmly, but she can only keep her voice steady for so long. “I’m here.” She tightens her lips and forces back whatever had tried to gather at her eyes. “I’m here.”

His arms suddenly wrap around her, and she finally loses her balance and falls sideways into his lap. She buries her face against him just as he presses his into her neck. His arms over her back, and the hard, erratic gusts of breath he exhales against her skin, are warm in the cold night. Irene is overwhelmed; she can only hide whatever pain she feels in the comforting crook of his shoulder, with her ear pressed to his pulse point.

“I thought you were dead,” he slurs against her neck, like he’s only now learning that wasn’t true.

“Ssshh,” is all she can manage. She puts her hands in his hair again, and to hide the fact that she can’t think of a single blessed thing to say, she angles his mouth to press against hers.

Their breaths are hot, and their lips smear against each other with zero grace, but soon Irene’s palms roam to press hard against his body under his dressing gown, and Sherlock’s have dragged up her thighs to push her skirt up as high as it can go so that he can rake his nails over her skin. They rock against each other in a rhythm punctuated by gasps and moans, until Sherlock pulls back from their kiss to drag his mouth over her neck and shoulder and Irene tilts back in ecstasy. Her fists tighten on his shirt even as his arms keep her held to his chest. Neither of them lets go.

Home is not London, Irene thinks to herself. Nor is it America, nor is it any secret hiding place in the expanse of Europe.

Home is this feeling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! :) We're nearly at the end!


	19. Constants

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The entirety of this chapter is NSFW.
> 
> Sorry for the wait! Tying off the loose ends of this one was surprisingly tough. Enjoy!

Sherlock Holmes thinks he might be going mad. Twenty hours ago he had believed Irene Adler to be dead and gone, and that he would never see her again. It wouldn’t pass for any kind of logic that she would be here now, in his flat and in his arms, the weight of her on his lap and the heat rising off her skin and melting into his as clear indications of someone who is very much alive.

There’s the fact, too, that only minutes ago she’d informed him that she was leaving for America. Already there’s a hollow place in his chest that even she can’t fill. It feels like selfishness.

Sherlock isn’t a religious man, though part of him wonders if there is a belief system out there that might explain the force that churned behind every mad thing he’s gone through in the last several months: finding Irene, leaving her, being made to choose between honouring his vow to the Watsons and searching for her, losing her, gaining her back, now losing her again. It’s narcissistic to believe that a higher power has chosen him specifically to knock around, perhaps more so to think it was all his own doing.

All of those thoughts, however, are banished the second Irene reaches her hand into his hair and yanks him roughly away, ending their frenzied kiss. Sherlock automatically sucks in a gasp of cold air. Their foreheads press together, the tips of their noses just barely brushing, as they both close their eyes and catch their breath. Her fingers stay tangled in his hair.

“My god,” Irene murmurs after a while. He feels her thumb stroke the dent of his cheek, and they open their eyes to look at each other. The moonlight glistens on her lashes and lips, though much of its red color has been smudged away by their kissing. His chest tightens as if by Pavlovian response, like the sight of her this close always means that she’s about to leave him.

He takes a question she’s asked him constantly and directs it back at her. “Tell me what you’re thinking.” He sounds calmer than he feels.

She gives a mysterious smile despite the wet glint in her eyes. “I’m thinking how much I’d like to bring you over to that sofa and take advantage of you.”

She doesn’t give him a second to respond, and instead draws him in for a hard, brief kiss, and then her weight leaves his lap as she stands up. Sherlock can think of nothing else but to follow her; he gets to his feet and Irene pulls him by the hand to his sofa. They both sink onto it sideways, facing each other, so that one of their legs is folded on the cushion while the other still reaches the floor. She links her fingers at the back of his neck while he cups her face, and they kiss deeply, but slowly and tentatively, almost like teenagers on their first night together. The space between them burns with an unnatural heat. Sherlock plunges his tongue deeper into Irene’s mouth, tasting the gasp she makes. Her hand travels down his abdomen and almost dips under the waistband of his pyjamas.

He shudders but leans back, one hand leaving her face to take her wrist away. She pulls back to stare at him, surprised, confused. But Sherlock only swallows, unable to find his voice to express what it is he wants to do. Instead he snakes his hands gently behind her neck and lower back, and after her momentary shiver, Irene’s expression melts into one of understanding.

The room around them is cool, but thick with the silence of anticipation. Sherlock, with aching slowness, tilts Irene back; she leans her weight into his hands, a quiet admission of trust, and her eyes don’t leave his. She keeps her arms wrapped over his shoulders as he lowers her to the cushion, until her head meets the armrest. Her knees knock gently against his sides and his blood seems to thrum.

He hungrily drags his mouth over her body; she’s still in her dress but the fabric is silky and taut so that his lips can feel her form and warmth through it. He senses her sigh and arch into his kiss, her fingers tightening in his hair. He goes lower and mouths at the shape of her rib, her navel, the jut of her hip, and she moans beautifully just as he reaches the place where her hem is bunched up to reveal the full length of her legs.

There is still a thin bandage wrapped around her injured thigh. It looks clean and smooth and newly dressed, but it stops Sherlock in his tracks. He stares at the white band, stark against her skin. Underneath the moonlight it even seems to glow. Here it is, then: A clear marker for where the bullet had struck her, and almost taken her life.

“It doesn’t hurt so much anymore,” he hears her gently assure him. One hand strokes his hair. Still, he stares, as if the creases and folds in the fabric might answer every question that’s suddenly sprung to his mind. Was she fighting? Running? Was she alone?

He silences all those frantic voices by leaning in to press his nose and lips to her thigh. It’s not quite a kiss, and he lingers there a long time, though he feels her shudder with desire all the same.

Sherlock moves back up so he can look into her face, which is already faintly flushed, her own lips parted though almost smiling. His heart drums hard, and he grips the edge of the sofa cushion for some support, while his other hand moves up the silky skin of her inner thigh.

When he reaches her knickers, he can’t hold back the gasp he makes as his fingers connect with damp satin fabric. This is the most overt indication of arousal he’s received from her thus far, and it makes his body throb with impatience. Irene’s eyes flutter closed for just a second, and then she watches him expectantly, already biting her lip. Her hand still clutches a fistful of his hair, her nails sinking against him ever-so-slightly. He lowers himself just fractionally closer to her, craving to fill his world with her face and scent and the soft sound of her breaths.

Slowly he nudges her knickers to the side so he can trace his finger over her slicked skin. Irene closes her eyes again, her jaw shaking in an enthralling way; Sherlock can’t resist dropping a kiss to it. He slides his fingers over her once more before pressing two digits into her entrance.

Irene lets out a full-throated gasp this time, grabbing his bicep and digging her nails in through his dressing gown. Sherlock wastes no time, pumping his fingers repeatedly into her; the inside of her is hot and tight and her muscles already flutter against his touch. Sweat begins to gather on his neck, chest, abdomen, from the sense memory of the pleasure this part of her, all of her, has given him before. His tongue darts out to lick the line of her jaw to mask how heavy his breaths have become.

He moves his thumb so that it can press against her clit, and Irene tips her head all the way back in a suddenly loud cry. Her hips buck so that the front of her brushes against his tenting erection. Sherlock lets out a needy groan, his fingers plunging into her faster as his thumb moves in insistent circles. He subconsciously starts moving his body in time with his hand as they start to rock against each other.

In just a matter of minutes Irene folds her arms over her face as something inside of her seems to grow taut from the prelude to her climax, though there are lines of desperation visible around her mouth. Sherlock rapidly peppers kisses on her neck and collarbones, all but biting at the sheer lace that gets in his way, pressing as much of himself as he can to her without slowing the rhythm of his fingers inside her. Already his palm is as coated in slickness as she is, and her hips continue to move against him in a way that just barely teases the heavy pulse between his legs.

He swirls his thumb against her clit until finally her mouth drops open, and her thighs and shoulders quiver for brief but intense shocks of time. Sherlock feels her orgasm pulse around his fingers, and he can’t help but gasp at the sensation, his free hand reaching to gather both her forearms into one grip and pull them away from her face so that he can watch every strain and twist of pleasure pass on her expression. He wants so badly to see her in this state, for her to relish it without a hint of hesitation or holding back, and he wants to be the one to give that to her.

When finally Irene relaxes against the sofa, dropping her arms to the armrest so that they curl like a halo around her head, Sherlock draws his fingers out and dips down to kiss her languidly. She reciprocates with a hum and her tongue delving into his mouth; it slides against his in a way that leaves him shuddering. The heat between their bodies bites at his skin through his clothes.

She’s the one outlier in this system. Here she is on the sofa that has always been fixed in this part of his flat from the very beginning, on a night he would have spent alone like any other night, drowning out the sound of the passing cars with his violin or the crackling in the fireplace. He doesn’t know when he’ll ever have her this way again. There’s a pattern to everything in his life except her.

“Clever,” she says into their kiss, and he can feel her smile against his lips, “You’re trying to make me miss you.”

That hadn’t been on his mind, but it isn’t a lie. Her words earlier all but confirmed that she will, indeed, miss him, or at the very least think of him often. But he has to wonder if that’s enough to motivate her to come back someday.

“Eye for an eye,” he rumbles, and moves his mouth to the skin under her ear. He feels her shiver and stroke the back of his neck.

Irene gives a gentle laugh. “You won’t have time to miss me, I promise. Clearly these Watsons and their daughter keep you too busy.”

He lets himself linger there, his head laying next to hers. “I’m never too busy.”

He feels her go still at those words, and he closes his eyes. Of course she would instantaneously sense the underlying meaning to that, look at the events of the past few weeks and find all the pieces missing in her picture. He had stayed in London to wait for Mary’s tracer to appear on his map for John’s and Rosie’s sake, yes, but that doesn’t mean he’d stopped searching for _her._

Irene shifts beneath him, and he moves back so they can look at each other again. Her hands lay on either side of his neck, her eyes searching his face. He lets her.

After a long, quiet moment, Irene says, “Show me.”

There’s nothing to lose in following her request. He moves off her and lets her sit up, her hair disheveled and dress rumpled but her skin visibly flushed even in the cool light. He leads her, with her fingers wrapped lightly around his arm in a way that distracts him more than it should, down the small hallway to his bedroom and opens the door.

The wall opposite them is pinned all over, floor to ceiling, with photographs, sheets of paper covered in scribbled notes, maps, diagrams, calendars. In the dark of the night, they look like an eerily obsessive work of art. There are hand-written timelines detailing her date of arrival in Istanbul, the dates on which they had held their phone calls and she updated him on her progress, her months spent under the radar, red marks over the days it’s possible she would have died. Headshots of the lieutenant generals, Waters, Browning, Shield, with all reports of their activity in the military before their disappearances into Turkey, but of course nothing afterward. Locations in Europe encircled, theories of where she could have fled in those weeks she didn’t respond to MI6. Every corner, every crevice of possibility, explored, in pursuit of her, all while waiting for Mary Watson to make a move.

He will always search for her, no matter if he can follow or not.

Sherlock watches Irene, who stands with her back turned to him, staring at the work on his wall. There’s no telltale emotion to be read off the curves of her shoulders, or her arms hanging limp at her sides. He lets himself look, anyway, because the sight of Irene Adler in his bedroom is not one he’s given often.

There’s a strange logic to reality. Throwing all of himself into the effort of finding her had worked once before, but not this time. She’s standing here next to him through no accomplishment of his own. He’s not baffled by that, nor is he frustrated. He can only find the energy to be grateful.

Irene finally turns to him after not saying anything for a full minute. She’s holding herself, and the look on her face is either wonder or pain. “Do you ever rest?”

He wavers where he stands. Her gaze seems to expertly undo the peace he’d felt just seconds earlier, and suddenly there’s a dull pain in his throat. “I don’t know what that means.”

Irene comes up to him, puts her hands on his face, and pulls him down for a long, deep kiss. Her tongue plunges in and out of his mouth, and occasionally she draws back, his bottom lip caught in her teeth. Sherlock stifles a groan and takes her by the shoulders, and she turns them both before pushing him down to sit on the side of his bed.

She stands before him and between his legs, and he throws his arms around her waist and brings his mouth back to her. She’s still in her silky dress but she’s not wearing a bra, so he can feel the softness of her breast and the pebbling of her nipple through the fabric, and he greedily presses his lips and tongue to their shape. Irene makes a whining noise, her fingernails digging into his nape. He simply molds a hand to her other breast and squeezes it hard, relishing the new warmth with which her body seems to burn, and then he moves to kiss at her abdomen. His limbs ache with want for her.

Without warning Irene shoves him back hard onto his bed. He hits the sheets with a grunt, and then quickly props himself up on his elbows and moves backwards into his bed to allow Irene some space to climb on. Suddenly he’s breathing heavily, and he’s forgotten everything else in the room. There’s only him and Irene, who’s crawled halfway up his body, her bare legs rubbing up against his still-covered ones in an infuriating way.

Mouth dropped open, he watches the flame sparking in her eyes, and then she dips her head to kiss a line down his sternum, and he feels like he might go mad from how tightly she’s been able to wind him despite the fact that either of them has yet to shed a single stitch of clothing. He’s still in his dressing gown, his old gray shirt and pyjamas, and she in her dark green dress. He’s sorely tempted to reach down and grab a hold of the zipper at her back so he can finally touch all her skin, but then Irene provides ample distraction when she slips her fingers into either side of the waistband of his pyjamas and slides it down just enough.

She gently wraps her hand around his cock, which up to now had been painfully hard and straining for her attention, and Sherlock can’t hold back the shaky breath that escapes him. The look on her face is sultry, blushing, promising, and then she lowers herself to slide her mouth over the tip.

Sherlock’s eyes fall shut. His fingers curl into clumsy fists as the wet, hot, slippery sensation envelops his cock, and his whole body involuntarily shudders with pleasure and relief. He tries to hold back his noises, but then Irene clamps her hands onto his hips and starts moving her head to accommodate more of him, and he lets out a long, deep, careless moan.

Irene works at him with cruel precision, sometimes sliding her tongue up the length of him, sometimes teasing just the head of his cock with the skill of her lips. He tips his head back to mask at least part of his undone expression, but his desperation is surely obvious from his heaving chest, curling toes, even his hips that buck weakly under her of their own volition. He’s never felt anything like this before, and with nothing to compare it to, he’s powerless against its surprises. The intense, concentrated pleasure, the indecent sounds, the friction, the challenge to not lose control, no matter how good and tempting it feels. And oh, it feels good. Too good. He gives a gasp when he feels her teeth graze his skin just so.

She starts sucking him faster, and Sherlock gives a harsh cry when it feels like it might tip him over the edge. His hand flies to her mess of hair. “Irene,” he blurts. His voice is raspy and unrecognizable.

Immediately she slides her mouth off him, and Sherlock wastes no time bending forward and pushing his lips to hers. They kiss mindlessly, their arms shaking with desire, as she slips his dressing gown off him and he yanks her zipper down the length of her dress before forcefully pushing it off her. He can’t help but sigh when he finally drags his hands down the smooth, perfect skin of her back, coated in sweat; she kicks off her knickers and then pulls his shirt over his head, and then his pyjamas down his legs.

After so much to prepare them, there’s no pause as Irene braces her hands on Sherlock’s shoulders, leaning him back again on his elbows, and then sinks onto his cock with a hard gasp. He grits his teeth at the sweet, pulsing heat of her; every inch of his skin is hypersensitive, so that even her palms resting on his collarbones feels like stimulation.

And then she starts grinding down onto him, already quick and desperate, and he can only eagerly thrust up to meet her, broken grunts escaping him. He drinks in the almost obscene sight of her hips rising up off his and crashing back, every repetition of it coiling him tighter and tighter. His hands gather fistfuls of sheet.

He tilts his pelvis and Irene whimpers as he hits a new angle of her; the escalation in pleasure is visible in the sudden arch of her back and the shape of her tense and open mouth. Her hair is half undone now, streaks of it falling over her pale shoulders. He craves to touch them, to touch her.

Her nails rake down his chest and sink against his ribs and nipples, and he lets out a groan. It propels him forward, gathering Irene into his arms, and flipping them over. He lands on top of her and without breaking their previous rhythm he starts surging against her, his hands holding her thighs spread apart, and she gives a loud, breathy cry.

He crashes into her with a kiss to hide the moan that’s welled up inside him. Her hands press into his back, her chest sliding against his, and he’s hit with a sudden pang of terror at the fact that after this, he’ll have to face a world without this feeling for god knows how long.

His hips continue to lurch forward, chasing after that sweltering pleasure, and he moves one of his hands up her thigh so he can press his thumb against her clit again. Irene makes a beautiful sound against his mouth, wrapping her legs around his waist, tightening their embrace in every way. His free hand gropes at her breast before sliding up to gently cup the back of her head.

Before long Irene’s hips squirm against his in desperation, leaning into the stimulation of his hand, and then she suddenly tilts away from their kiss. Her internal muscles squeeze him with a new intensity, and he whines as he drives into that pleasure, racing to join her in that moment of perfect balance. Her orgasm seems to last an eternity as she continues to twitch in time with the powerful waves of her aftershocks, but then she says, softly, unevenly, “Sherlock,” and he loses himself in the sound of her voice.

He stills, buried deep inside her, and his rough cry is cut short. Everything around him seems to blink out of existence – there’s only him, the wrinkles that he feels underneath him in his messed bed sheet, the inexplicable heat, and of course her, all of her. He spills into her, his limbs quaking from the release, and it feels like a mindless eternity before finally dropping limply against her.

They roll onto their sides, still tangled in each other’s arms, breaths still heavy and hurried. He’s drenched in sweat and so is she; still he clings to her back, her hair. He feels her face press into his neck just below his chin.

His mind is still drunk with bliss, and his arms are still filled with Irene, but his heart continues to thrum with that pain that he’s accepted will always be there, so it’s unclear if it really is his voice that whispers in the dark, “Will I ever see you again?”

It’s unclear, too, if it’s Irene’s voice that whispers back, “Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm almost terrified to post the final chapter because this means it's all over. At the same time, I'm endlessly happy and grateful. See you all next week, and thank you for sticking with the story this far!


	20. Light Years

_Months Earlier_

“Go to sleep.”

“Hmm?”

“You’ve been yawning.” Sherlock holds his MI6 mobile to his ear while he looks out his bedroom window. The sky outside is dark and cool, and he imagines it’s darker still in Turkey, where it must already be early morning. “You can look through his inbox again tomorrow.”

Irene laughs, and her voice is deep and coloured with fatigue. “Shield and Browning could kick down my door tomorrow.” She then does, in fact, yawn. “Besides, isn’t keeping awake all throughout a case your own strategy?”

“You’re not me.”

“Trust me, I’m reminded every day,” she says with no bitterness. There’s the sound of rustling and shifting over fabric; she’s finally laid down in bed. When her voice returns, he can tell she’s lying on her side. “Sometimes I wonder how much faster this would be done if you were here.”

“If I were there in your place?”

“No. If you were here, with me.”

A plane passes overhead, fading in and out of view behind the clouds. The strobe lights on its wingtips blink on and off, their white stark against the night sky. The aircraft slowly descends, its shape growing larger and lights glowing brighter. It’s clear that it’s going to land, possibly carrying inside it dozens of Londoners who are coming home.

It dips into the distant skyline, and Sherlock looks away.

“You don’t need me there,” he says, crawling into bed himself, though he’s barely tired. The day had consisted of helping the Watsons look after Rosie, scrolling through Twitter for cases with the slightest promise of a connection to the Moriarty videos, listening to world news until the tinny voices of anchors all began to blend together into empty noise. It’s only his occasional phone calls with her that seem to be free of any kind of tedium or routine.

“Of course I don’t,” Irene replies. “If it ever came to that, I’d never admit it to you.”

He cracks a smile. She’ll never see it, of course.

She yawns again, and his smile fades. “You should rest.”

“Nothing here feels like rest,” she says. “It just feels like delaying the inevitable.”

He slowly turns on his bed till he lies on his side, facing the empty half of his bed. “What do you consider the inevitable?”

Irene hums. “Either I go home, or suffer a painful death.” A pause. “Surely you see my dilemma here.”

He says nothing for a while. Instead he imagines that she’s here, and they’re speaking face to face. Her hair would be loose, falling over her shoulder and the curve of her cheek. She would still be in her thick, uncomfortable daywear, though lying in bed surrounded by printouts of text messages, CCTV screens, notes. The light shafting in from his window would have fallen right on her leg, wrapping over her shape. She’d be holding a device to her ear like him. She would have been smiling.

“That doesn’t matter now,” he tells her. “What matters now is that you’re tired. You need your mind functioning at its maximum capacity.”

“Won’t you stay on with me,” Irene says, and his illusion of her mouths it, “until I fall asleep?”

His face is suddenly warm. “What?”

“You don’t need to say anything. Just stay on till you hear me snoring. I’d just like the company.”

Her voice still carries a hint of playfulness in it, but her request seems serious. For a moment he forgets how to form words. He keeps the mobile held to his ear, and listens to the sound of her breath until it almost melds in with the echo in his quiet bedroom.

Irene says nothing. She lies still, blanketed by the moonlight, looking only at him. A lock of her hair has slid down to rest over her lips - he almost instinctively reaches out to brush it away, his fingers even twitching over his sheet, before he remembers that she’s only a hallucination. There’s something new in her expression, like a shadow of pain over her eyes, though he suspects it’s only a mirror of his own.

“Sherlock,” he hears her voice again through the speaker, “Will you?”

He doesn’t know how the next few minutes will go, nor the next few months of Irene’s mission, nor anything else after that. It strikes him in that moment that neither does she. He imagines her looking at him now, face tired, one hand stretching towards his own. The inches between them are miles.

He takes a breath. “Good night, Miss Adler.”

He sees her smile.

* * *

When Sherlock was a child, he had thought the sky was a dome.

On nights when his mother would forget to send him up to bed, he sat outside and stared up at the stars, which looked to him like tiny pinpoints of light stuck to a vast, dark ceiling, and he’d be able to reach up and pluck them out if only he was tall as his older brother. The most tempting of all was that flat paper moon, which stood out as the biggest and brightest of the lights.

“You can’t just pick the stars from the sky,” Mycroft explained to him, after a fairly boring lecture on the “solar system” which Sherlock didn’t care much for, “They’re too far away. So, so far away that even I can’t reach them.”

“Then why can I still see them?” He thought of how every morning their parents pulled away in the car to go to work and if he watched long enough they disappeared into the narrowing road.

“Light,” said Mycroft. “It’s one of the fastest things you can imagine. It’s travelled trillions of miles from its home to reach you.”

“If it can do that to reach me,” Sherlock’s face had screwed into a frown, “Why can’t I do the same?”

Mycroft laughed then - a sound Sherlock virtually never heard. He put a hand on his little brother’s shoulder, coaxing him to come back inside and go to bed. “If you could travel anywhere that quickly, knowing you, you’d never be home.”

It doesn’t have to be that way, Sherlock had thought to himself, unhappy with his brother’s explanations. Perhaps there was a special place between the ground and the giant dome of the sky, where he and the stars could meet in the middle.

* * *

_Present_

Sherlock Holmes has a complicated relationship with exhaustion, but he knows a losing battle when he sees one.

He sleeps.

It’s deep and dreamless and soothing, though he does blink awake at one point, lying on his side, to the sight of Irene up and out of his bed. She’s put on his blue dressing gown, and her back is turned to him while she lays her hands on his bedroom window, looking out.

For long time she doesn’t move, and neither does he. His arm stretches over the empty space she’s left on his sheets. She stands perfectly still at his window, her head tilted just slightly back as if looking at the sliver of sky that peeks out between his flat and the neighboring building.

After a stretch of silence, she bows her head, and her shoulders begin to shake. She stays this way for a long time.

He closes his eyes slightly, pretending to be asleep, when she finally turns around. It’s too dark to see her face, but he does watch her wipe it with the back of her hand as she returns to bed and slips back underneath the covers.

Much, much later, when they both stir awake, and he slips the dressing gown down and off her arms as their bodies slide together, he presses his lips to her cheeks and they’re already dry.

* * *

Dawn begins to tinge his windows with warm colour. It rises from behind Irene, who lies on her side facing him, his blanket pulled up to just below her waist. She seems to have no interest in watching it herself, only looking at him.

“What will you do now?” she asks.

He wades through what feels like gravel in his throat to locate his voice. “Take down the mole in the Government that Mary Watson’s partner mentioned. It shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Be careful,” she warns, “If there’s anything I’ve learned, when you accomplish something easily, you’ll lose something easily, too.”

Nothing had been easy about losing her. “I’ll let you know how it goes. You have your old number back, no?”

She grins slyly. Her hair is tossed over his pillow, swept away from her neck to keep it cool. “The same one already on your mobile, yes.”

Ah. He’ll always know when it’s her texting, then. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She leaves in an hour or so. She’ll disappear into America to solve a case that might take her a year or more. And yet here they are, lying in bed like it was any other morning, bantering like it was any other day. It’s easier than heartfelt goodbyes, at least. He imagines her rising up off the bed one last time, shrugging on her dress, collecting her scattered hairpins from his blankets. It makes his eyes sting.

Suddenly she puts her hand over the one he has lying between them, closing her fingers over it. “Try not to contact me too often.”

He’s too melted by exhaustion to violently object. “Why - because you predict I’ll miss you?”

“Because I’ll miss you.”

There’s a look in her eyes he recognises. He might have imagined it on her before. But the shadow of it falls over the wrinkles in his pillow and sheets, and he knows this time it’s real.

He closes his eyes and bends to bring her hand to his mouth. He holds his lips against the back of it, a long, lingering one. When he’s done, Irene pulls him close, hands over the back of his neck, to presses a kiss between his brows, then another to his forehead, until she kisses a trail up to the top of his head, where she leaves her longest one, her face buried in his hair. Sherlock breathes her in throughout it all, his face tucked into her neck, one of his arms thrown over her back.

He will see her again. The time between that time and now almost barely matters. There are points on the plane of the universe that cannot be destroyed or moved.

He opens his eyes to a view of his window again. It’s overwhelmingly bright from the sunrise, which spills into his bedroom like he’s never seen before, though the curve of Irene obstructs part of his view so that the light is bent and shaped like her.

Sherlock Holmes closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we have it!
> 
> A heartfelt thank you to every single one of you who read, kudosed, commented, and/or bookmarked. You have made me smile every single day, and I am so grateful to be able to call some of you my friends. Special shoutout to randomscientist, youbloodymoron, dinnerxx, dramakhaleesi, Lady_Anthea, andthewaltzgoeson, ForYouIAmRomy, Krishna, Francesca_Wayland, ADbLOCK, and acvenga for being some of the most frequent commenters and/or for constantly having such kind and encouraging words to say. Thank you for wonderful conversations. A double-shoutout to randomscientist, as well, for designing a fantastic book cover for TSOTU, viewable [here!](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/119778219)
> 
>  **ETA, DECEMBER 12TH, 2017:** A big, fat, overjoyed thank you to SceneryFr and ChristinaCC for working on a Chinese translation of The Shape Of The Universe! You can find all finished chapters [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12875334/chapters/29410731) Thank you, friends, for your hard work
> 
> I have something of a sequel already outlined (which I've already told some commenters); I don't know how long it will take me to complete it. It's a sequel to TSOTU more in the chronological sense than thematic, as it's set right after The Final Problem. I hope to still drop into the Adlock tag occasionally with a oneshot or two. :) Oh, you have no idea how much I'll miss all of you!
> 
> From the bottom of my heart, thank you, thank you, thank you. Please don't feel afraid to ever chat (though I'm not sure how - perhaps let me know what the best platform is, seeing as how AO3 still lacks a PM feature!) Kisses to you all. <3


End file.
